Market Data - Japan

Came across some interesting mobile market data.

Am jotting/sharing -

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Excerpts below:

The mobile business in the walled garden of the carriers grew by
23% in 2007 to 10 billion dollars, according to a report
released by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and
Communications in July. However, the garden is getting very
crowded - there were more than 16 thousand mobile sites listed
on the carrier decks offered by 4,300 companies.

Mobile content sales accounted for about 4 billion dollars of
which 1.5 billion was spent on music. Due to the introduction
of flat data rate plans by the carriers, users do not have to
bother anymore about data usage, causing a shift to
consumption of rich contents. Downloads of full-length songs
reached 1 billion dollars, while the traditional ring tone
business fell 34% to 500 million dollars. Sales on e-books,
the fastest growing content, doubled last year to 200 million.
Popular genres are books about current TV dramas and movies,
mystery, comics, and history.

Mobile commerce is growing faster than the content business –
total revenues were about 6.5 billion dollars in 2007.
M-commerce is divided in three categories: shopping, services,
and transactions. Services - including sales of concert tickets,
hotel and restaurant reservations, airline and train tickets –
grew by 41% to 250 million dollars. The size of the mobile
advertising and promotion market was 550 million dollars in
2007.

Like on the PC, the search on mobile phones is a battle between
Google and Yahoo! Contrary to the PC world, MMD Labs, a market
research firm, found that Google Mobile is number two in the
Japanese market with a share of 52.5%, while 74.9% frequently
uses Yahoo Mobile. Most popular search categories are artists
and comedians, music, and vocabulary. Almost 40% of all
searches are for multiple key words.

A recent user panel survey by Net Asia revealed that
26% is watching mobile TV. It is not clear how the business
model around OneSeg will be defined