Although Japanese consumers are among the world’s most voracious consumers of smartphones, BlackBerry said on Thursday that they won’t be getting its new line of phones.
Two days after releasing its new BlackBerry Z10 handset in Canada, BlackBerry, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said it would not follow suit in Japan.
“Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 smartphones there at this time,†Adam Emery, a spokesman for the company said in an e-mail. “We will continue to support BlackBerry customers in Japan.â€
Mr. Emery did not respond to questions about the continued sale in Japan of the company’s older line of phones based on the BlackBerry 7 operating system.
Nikkei, the Japanese financial newspaper, first reported the retreat by BlackBerry, the company formerly known as Research in Motion.
Perhaps because the Roman alphabet keyboard that traditionally distinguished BlackBerrys offered relatively littl utility for Japanese users working in their own language, the smartphones never found enormous success in that market.
ComScore, a company that tracks mobile and Web usage, did not break out BlackBerry’s market share in Japan in a study released last August. Instead, BlackBerry was lumped with other unspecified operating system makers, which held a combined total of just 0.4 percent of the market.
The Google Android operating system, ComScore reported, had a market share of 64.1 percent, and Apple’s iOS had 32.3 percent.
The touchscreen based Z10 was released last week in Britain. It will arrive in stores in the United States at a still unspecified date next month.
A second phone with a physical keyboard as well as a touchscreen, the Q10, will be released later in the spring. At the Canadian introduction, Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of BlackBerry, appeared ! to suggest that the Q10 may arrive later than April, the company’s initial delivery date estimate.
