Apple is dominating the Japanese smartphone market

The iPhone has hit a new all-time high when it comes to market share in Japan: representing a massive 36.6% of all Japanese smartphones in the first quarter of 2014. This increase, which is up from last year’s 25.5%, was driven by Apple’s deal with NTT DoCoMo, a.k.a. Japan’s largest carrier. Apple launched the iPhone 5s and 5c with NTT DoCoMo back in September, and sales have been rocketing upwards ever since. Sales have proven so good, in fact, that Apple recently moved Doug Beck, chief of sales for Japan and Korea, over to handle the North American beat.

Apple Inc. (AAPL) boosted its share of the Japan mobile-phone market to more than a third after the country’s largest wireless carrier started selling the iPhone. Apple boosted iPhone shipments in Japan to 36.6 percent of the market in the year ended March, up from 25.5 percent a year earlier, according to Tokyo-based MM Research Institute Ltd. The Cupertino, California-based smartphone maker shipped 14.43 million phones in Japan the past fiscal year, the researcher said. Apple, which struck a deal in January with China Mobile Ltd. (941) to sell iPhones in the world’s largest market, is trying to recapture customers from Samsung Electronics Co. (005930), which boosted global market share the last four years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. NTT Docomo Inc. (9437), Japan’s largest wireless carrier by subscribers, began offering iPhones in September as it seeks to stem losses to competitors including SoftBank Corp.