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Useless Survey: 91% of Japanese Will Not Buy 'iPhone'

Wednesday June 18, 2008 5:15 pm PDT by Arnold Kim
Making the rounds today is a rather useless survey which claims that 91% of Japanese will not buy the 'iPhone'. While I may have a personal bias against online surveys and their overreaching conclusions, this one is particularly unhelpful.

Much of the online press are describing this as a negative story, suggesting that 91% of the Japanese not being interested in the iPhone is a disappointing statistic. AlleyInsider spins it only slightly more appropriately, reporting that an impressive 9% of all Japanese are going to buy an iPhone. 9% of the Japanese population represents 11 million people, suggesting that Japan alone could be responsible for Apple's entire 10 million target mark this year.

Of course, neither conclusion is valid since it's not clear from the report how participants had been selected, making it impossible to generalize to the entire Japanese population.

Another disappointing aspect of the survey is that it was conducted before the iPhone 3G was officially announced, which means answers were based on knowledge and pricing of the original iPhone which has never been available for sale in Japan.

That being said, it's not a foregone conclusion that the iPhone will see success in Japan. Wired explored the dramatically different market mobile market found in Japan:

Japan is a culture of spec sheets. When consumers go to electronics stores to buy a cellphone, they frequently line up the specifications side by side to compare them before deciding which one to buy.

Though, it appears that many customers only use a very small percentage of features in their mobile phones in Japan. It remains to be seen if the interface and relative simplicity of the iPhone will be able to win significant marketshare in Japan.
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bloodycape
Posted: 51 months ago
My understanding is many Japanese people prefer if their device has some sort of DMB or 1SEG TV option as that is like a huge thing there. After all Sony, Toshiba and others offers mp3 and cellphones exclusively for their home markets with 1Seg TV option. But, I could be totally off.
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dfnj123
Posted: 51 months ago
I would like to see this data redone now
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BornAgainMac
Posted: 51 months ago
I am curious how other Japanese phones handle their advanced language characters? Seems like the iPhone will handle it.
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mavis
Posted: 51 months ago
I think 9% is a huge number, I'm sure Apple (or any company!) would love to see that kind of penetration in every market ...

I doubt we'll see that here, but so far there has been massive interest in the iPhone - Softbank's call center is getting swamped with information requests, shops that started accepting pre-orders are seeing huge numbers of people signing up on waiting lists, and the iPhone has been in the news (TV, newspaper) regularly since it was announced. Comparisons to other, high-end Japanese phones have been overwhelmingly positive (in favor of the iPhone) based not only on price, but user interface and 'coolness' ...

The iPhone is going to be huge here. I can't wait!! :D
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Willis
Posted: 51 months ago
this will be interesting to see pan out... 9% = ~11M people... thats an awful lot of people. And because that was prior to the lower price points, I'll put money on it being an even higher percentage.
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GutBomb
Posted: 51 months ago

Targeting Internet users aged primarily 20 to 49, iSHARE asked questions about their intention to purchase an iPhone, as well as other questions and received 402 responses over the Internet.


Did anyone actually read the article?

It's not 9% of all of japan planning to buy an iphone. It's 9% of people who choose to answer a poll about cell phones that plan to buy an iphone. And they only polled 402 people.

So congrats. 40 people plan to buy the iphone in japan.

statistics are fun. (and useless)

The fact that they could only get 402 responses to an internet forum targeting internet users aged 18-49 says to me that the interest in the iphone is very low, and what interest there is, is pretty negative.
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Decrepit
Posted: 51 months ago
Yes, our technology is seriously behind that of the Japanese.

The density of their population has allowed certain technologies to be adopted quickly.

If Japanese or Korean companies had to offer the capabilities they offer now, but across the width of North America, things would have moved more slowly.
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pgifford
Posted: 51 months ago

Did anyone actually read the article?

It's not 9% of all of japan planning to buy an iphone. It's 9% of people who choose to answer a poll about cell phones that plan to buy an iphone. And they only polled 402 people.

So congrats. 40 people plan to buy the iphone in japan.

statistics are fun. (and useless)


I don't think you understand how polls and statistics work. Obviously they can't poll everyone in Japan. They can extrapolate results within a certain margin of error from a sampling of the population - the more people they poll, the smaller the margin of error. How do you think they come up with results from other polls like the president's popularity ratings? Nobody I know has ever been asked if they approve or disapprove of the president, yet they can say that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of him.
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GutBomb
Posted: 51 months ago

I don't think you understand how polls and statistics work. Obviously they can't poll everyone in Japan. They can extrapolate results within a certain margin of error from a sampling of the population - the more people they poll, the smaller the margin of error. How do you think they come up with results from other polls like the president's popularity ratings? Nobody I know has ever been asked if they approve or disapprove of the president, yet they can say that 70 percent of Americans disapprove of him.


I understand fine. My point was that 402 people that have enough of an interest in cell phones to respond to a poll about them is not a sufficient sample size to say what japan wants or not. The statistics are completely useless. To equate 9% of responses to a poll that 402 people responded to to 11 million people is ludicrous.

I said 40 people to point out the ridiculousness of people wetting themselves about 11 million iphone sales in japan. I know full well it's going to fall somewhere in between 40 and 11 million, but i am pretty damn sure it's gonna be a lot closer to 40 than 11 million.
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pgifford
Posted: 51 months ago

I understand fine. My point was that 402 people is not a sufficient sample size to say what japan wants or not. The statistics are completely useless. To equate 9% of responses to a poll that 402 people responded to to 11 million people is ludicrous.

I said 40 people to point out the ridiculousness of people wetting themselves about 11 million iphone sales in japan. I know full well it's going to fall somewhere in between 40 and 11 million, but i am pretty damn sure it's gonna be a lot closer to 40 than 11 million.


it just means that there will be a bigger margin of error. So instead of 9% it may be 4% or 1% or 12% or 20%, etc. I think they should at least do the survey again with the new iphone, pricing and the fact that it'll actually be sold in Japan - it may be incentive enough to buy one.
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