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There are few companies that can boast a global brand presence as big as Samsung’s. The South Korean giant has their hands in just about everything these days, with televisions, washer machines, and smartphones accounting for their billions in revenue every year.
But despite their best marketing efforts, Samsung may not have much pull in Japan, where total mobile sales account for barely 5.6% of smartphones sold in the country. While it’d be easy to assume this could have something to do with the Japanese mostly favoring national brands like Sharp, Fujitsu, or Sony, keep in mind Apple occupies nearly 40.8% of the market. In any case, that’s not about to stop Samsung from who will be bringing their new Galaxy S6 flagship to the country on April 23rd.
What’s interesting is Samsung’s branding — at least for the NTT Docomo model — has been completely stripped from the phone, as pointed out by The Korea Herald. The S6 Edge model is completely devoid of any Samsung branding on the front, with only the carrier name and “Galaxy” branding on the back. The regular S6 model has Docomo’s branding on the front (where the Samsung logo would normally go) and once again, only “Galaxy” on the back. No S6, no S6 Edge — none of that.
According to Samsung, they feel the Galaxy brand has been “well established in Japan” but declined to comment further. While it’s not uncommon to find Japanese carrier Docomo de-brand handsets in favor of their own logo (it was the same case for last year’s Samsung Galaxy S5 and even their Note line in Japan), you’ll find Sony’s Xperia line was left alone. Go figure.
Samsung made a bad decision to hold off on the Emerald Green S6 Edge. I would’ve been all over that one. Personally, I think White looks the best among the two main Edge devices.
So they didn’t release that, or it’s just only available in select markets? I agree, that one is solid.
It’s for the summer :)
Can you all stay on the topic??? :(
Lol and I thought verizon was bad
Too bad they didn’t de-bloat and de-TouchWiz the phone too.. Then ur talking!
At this stage TW isn’t the horrendous monster some folks try and make it out to be. Easily tamed as any other skin out there.
I wouldn’t say as tamed but so close it doesn’t matter, there’s still a little way to go, but it looks like Samsung is definitely back on the right path.
Okay, I’m going to go ahead and point out the elephant in the room. Removing Samsung’s name from their phones will increase sales in Japan. Why? Racism. To what degree or how prevalent racism is in Japan, I’m not going to debate here.
My point is that Samsung has tremendous business savy in allowing it’s phones to go unbranded apparently in order to increase sales whilst also building a customer base that might never have otherwise tried a Samsung device.
I don’t want to get into a huge debate about racism so, I shall bow out of this topic now.
Thus is partly true. Most Japanese carriers put their brand on every phone, so when you ask the average Japanese person what their phone is, they’ll reply “Docomo”, ” AU” or “Softbank”. All the carriers do this, and they usually also change the name, from the original name (so, an “Acme Super-Fone” would be called a “Softbank SX-16”, or something).
Also, apart from the iPhone, most phones are only released on ONE carrier in Japan, due mainly to the corruption and power enjoyed by a nationalistic market (complete with government protectionism).
This means that any company, Japanese or otherwise, hasn’t got the clout to tell Docomo and cronies what goes on, or on their phones. For years, the carriers and Japanese phone manufacturers abused their power so much, that most most modern foreign phones at the time (which were much more advanced than Japanese ones), were not available to buy. Unfortunately, the iPhone and Android became too big to ignore, and once foreign phones came in, the Japanese domestic companies were almost destroyed. Sony is one of the few companies still making phones in Japan, and even they are scaling their phone division back.
Sony should just sell their phone division already so someone else can put greater focus and effort on it. Push for greater market saturation with their best devices. I can’t walk into a Sprint or Verizon store and see Sony flagships. Pity. They’re beautiful things really. Imagine what a Sony device would look like if given the same efforts of those from Sammy, HTC and LG?