Apple iPod holds sway in Japan

[Mac Reporter]

Juliana Sasaki did not bother checking out Sony's digital music player in Tokyo before buying her iPod mini.

"I knew Sony and other companies had MP3 players, but they can't beat the mini," says Sasaki, 23, a language teacher. "I went straight to the Apple store. The mini is so cute."

In Japan, home to four of the world's top-five consumer electronics companies by sales, advance orders made Apple Computer's iPod mini the top-selling portable player three weeks before its July 24 release. It still is.
About 40 percent of the 1.5 million digital music players sold in Japan this year will come from Apple, said David Marra, a media consultant at A.T. Kearney in Tokyo. That may rise to as much as 70 percent, led by the iPod mini, he said.

Apple's three iPods - the ¥26,000 mini, which stores 1,000 songs, and the larger 20-gigabyte and 40-gigabyte models - rank first, second and fifth respectively by sales for digital players in Japan, according to Gfk Marketing.

Read more at International Herald Tribune.