The shipment volume of the smartphone for Japanese domestic market in 2008 was 1.58 million units, 68% increase compared to the previous year. As well as the series of new product introductions by oversea manufacturers, the major growth factor was the aggressive introduction of smartphones by communication carriers who intended to develop new business opportunities, which was motivated by the saturated market demand for the third-generation (3G) mobile phones.

■   　Smartphone market in Japan shows gradual growth and expected to reach 3.65 million units of the market scale by 2012.

While the overall mobile phone market is in tough situation, it is projected that the smartphone shipment is increased to 2.07 million units in 2009, which is 31% increase from the year before, with widened variation in product lineup and is forecasted to grow further to 3.65 million units in 2012 backed by the expected improvement in telecommunication environment and in performance of terminal devices.

Total global shipment of smartphones was 136.725 million units in 2008. In particular, European market and US market have made remarkable growth thanks to a wave of introduction of products including the one that deals with "push mail" service and another one with unique design, etc. Although the year-on-year decrease of the total mobile phone shipment should be unavoidable, global smartphone shipment in 2009 is estimated to be 151.93 units, 11% increase from the year before, based on the assumption that the manufacturers focus on the smarpthones as the growth field, and introduce brand new products with various operating systems and interfaces and low-priced products.

 

Although the mobile phone market is saturated, netbook PCs have been steadily becoming popular by offering package deals that include subscription to data communication access, which increased the selection of mobile devices connectable to the Internet as a result. For the smartphones, mobile phones, netbook PCs and MIDs should be the competing categories of products in the market. In order for the smartphone to differentiate itself from competing products and to ensure its existence value, it is quite important to consider how it could incorporate and provide unique value-added in the way that diversified users' needs are adequately satisfied. While mobile internet services have been firmly established in Japanese market, smartphones are based on global platform, which is the biggest feature and advantage of the products. Also, the most effective way of differentiation from competing products like netbook PCs and MIDs may be to realize most appropriate interfaces for mobile communications while making performance difference closer to the foregoing competing products. Although those new types of devices may be competing with each other, it is highly anticipated that each of them will establish its own position in the market depending on lifestyle of users.

Total global shipment volume of the smartphones in 2008 was 136.725 million units, 52.1% increase from the year before. (Shipment in 2007 was 89.875 million units.) While the total shipment of mobile phones will record the year-on-year decrease in 2009 due to serious economic downturn in the market of advanced countries, globale smartphone market is forecasted to grow steadily to 151.93 million units in shipment volume, 11% increase from 2008.

The smartphones that deal with "push mail" service or the ones that have unique design enjoyed wide popularity in 2008. The smartphones have already been playing a major role for the prevalence of "mobile internet services" in oversea countries since the communication carriers have been aggressively promoting the sales by offering rebates.

The market in 2009 is expected to be much more competitive because the leading manufacturers are anticipated to aggressively launch new products to regain market share and there may be new entrants from other businesses and some other manufacturers who intend to increase their market share by offering low price models, although only new start-up manufacturers demonstrated the presence in 2008.

The five remarkable product trends for smartphones in 2009 should be 1) improvement of the user interfaces by incorporating "touch panels", 2) performance improvement by using high performance processors and 3) progress of polarization between hi-end and low-end owing to the development of low cost platform, 4) retention of terminal device manufacturers and application developers by making the platform open and 5) promotion of vertical integration by major manufacturers, which makes it possible for them to also offer contents services to be integrated into terminal devices.

Looking at the market trends by geographical area, continuous demand is expected also in US market and European market, where the mobile phone sales are sluggish. In developing countries, 3G services (the third generation mobile phone services) based on W-CDMA (UMTS) standard have started in one country after another, and many new markets are going to emerge.

Furthermore, it is highly likely that the approaches by the major manufacturers who try to regain market share or the companies who intend to newly enter the market may have a major impact on the market structure as many of those companies adopt the "multiplatform strategy" where multiple numbers of operating systems can be used.