TamsS60 has covered Nokia’s woes in Japan extensively in the last few days – in case anyone of you is new to the topic, please be aware that Japanese gadget culture is completely different from European/US one. Japan is the country of big phones, expensive PDAs and small laptops.
Furthermore, Japanese people are highly technical, as this quote from 3GDoctor’s David Doherty shows:
FYI Raku-Raku translates into Easy Easy. These phones are meant to be easy to use mobiles and are marketed to digital immigrants (like the elderly who didn’t grow up with cellphone technology).
In the UK Vodafone have a similar offering with their “Simple” branding. Thankfully these phones live up to the promise a little better than these NTT Docomo offerings.
According to Forbes, Nokia now gives up on its 1% market share in Japan: 50 sales/marketing clerks will be let go, while the 350-strong R&D team will remain active. Sales and marketing of Nokia phones (Vertu excluded) will cease in Japan afterwards, which means that Japanese readers who feel the urge for an S60 phone should get theirs ASAP.
I personally think that the carcass of Nokia shall serve as a cenotaph for other tech companies wanting to enter/exit the Japanese market. Concepts liked by the Japanese are not always going to be liked by US/European customers and vice versa: translating the UI to Japanese definitely is not enough.
For Nokia, the loss is small and sensible: it’s the Symbian Foundation who looses out big. Many Japanese phones currently use FOMA, an UI stack which has been killed off in the process of the establishment of the Symbian Foundation.
Weak Nokia sales leave the Symbian folks vulnerable at the back: they now must either give up their strong market share in Japan, or continue to develop FOMA…
What do you think?
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Masato OHTA
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