It's been quite a while since I had the time to post about the Japanese smartphone market share, so I'll catch up now. Here goes:

In 2023, the smartphone market in Japan was again and not surprisingly dominated by Apple with a 51.9% market share (up from 48.4% in 2022), leaving 48.1% to Android devices or 15.7 vs. 14.6 million shipments.

The leader in the Android-smartphone market was, for the seventh year in a row, Sharp, with a 10.9% share of the whole market, which in turn equals 22.7% of the Android market.

This marks a slight drop from 11.1% in 2022. The actual number of units sold has also dwindled – in 3.26 million in 2023 against 3.8 million in 2022.

Not only Sharp sold fewer devices in 2023. The decline in total shipments is -11.6% in 2023 (was -8.1% in 2022) or 30.3 million units vs. 34.2 million units, this signalling market saturation and longer replacement cycles. This is the year Sharp started promising three OS upgrades for their phones and five years of security updates.

The second place was a surprise – Google, with a 10.7% share of the total market or 22.2% of the Android market and 3.22 million units shipped. This is some remarkabled growth from 1.5% in 2022 – a whooping 527% year-on-year increase and was possible because of Google's Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel 7a models, and strategic partnership with NTT Docomo.

Both Samsung and Sony declined by more than 1 million units in 2023 compared to 2022. Samsung was No. 3 in Japan and held 14.5% of the Android market or 7.0% of the total smartphone market.

In 2023, Sony climbed to number four and now held 10.4% of the Android market or 5.0% of the total smartphone market.

FCNT (former Fujitsu) held the exact same share as Sony (10.4%) and seemingly performed well, or maybe not too bad because it held 10.3% in 2022, meaning it had actually made a gain, however small it might be. But that's not how FCNT's market and finance experts saw things... and in May 2023, the manufacturer filed for bankruptcy. While its market share had been keeping up – was ~8.5% in Q1, then fell to 7.9% in Q2, after the announcement, shipments plummeted to ~4.0% in Q3, then <1.0% in Q4. FCNT was acquired by Lenovo in September 2023 and even launched new products in 2024 (Arrows We2 and Arrows We2 Plus, both mid-range devices with a MediaTek chip).

Xiaomi stood fifth with 4.2% of the Android market and 2.0% of all smartphones, leaving 15.5% to Others.

Source: IDC.