Japanese Phone Firm Sees Export Market in Older Users

Rather than competing with dominant brands like Samsung and Apple in the mainstream smartphone market, Fujitsu is aiming at a niche — older consumers, who, the company says, are not always served adequately by products like Apple’s iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy series.

In partnership with Orange, formerly France Télécom, Fujitsu has started selling a smartphone in France that uses a technology called Raku-Raku, or “easy easy.”

The Raku-Raku handset has a touch screen and provides on-the-go Internet access, but it has larger buttons and other features aimed at older people who sometimes struggle with the complexity of conventional smartphones.

“We believe the smartphone provides benefits to these customers,” said Toru Mizumoto, the director of the mobile product division at Fujitsu.

In partnership with NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile network operator in Japan, Fujitsu has sold 20 million Raku-Raku phones in Japan since it introduced them in 2001. Ten million of them remain in active use more than a decade later. While most of these phones are old-fashioned feature phones, Fujitsu and DoCoMo introduced the first Raku-Raku smartphone in Japan last year.

Japanese manufacturers tend to focus on the domestic market, introducing features that are considered innovative here but considered quirky and less appealing elsewhere.

While aging consumers may be a niche market, they present a growing opportunity in most industrialized countries. In Japan, 39 percent of the population will be 65 or older in 2050, up from 23 percent in 2010, according to the Statistics Bureau of Japan. In France, the 65-and-older cohort will grow to 25 percent in 2050 from 17 percent in 2010, data from the United Nations show.

“If you’re a smaller vendor and maybe haven’t had much of a presence in Europe, it makes sense to look at these kinds of niches,” said André Malm, an analyst at Berg Insight, a research firm in Gothenberg, Sweden. “It’s an underserved market.”

The 65-and-up population may be growing, but 65-year-olds are becoming younger, too — at least in terms of their affinity for technology. Those who will retire in 2020 or 2030 are active on Facebook or Twitter now.

“We see that there is a big, big part of the senior population that is willing to go for a smartphone,” said Augustin Becquet, the head of Orange’s device portfolio.

While the elders of tomorrow may be increasingly comfortable with technology, their physical dexterity may deteriorate with age, as it has with past generations. That is where the Raku-Raku smartphone, called the Fujitsu Stylistic S01, comes in.

At first glance, the S01 looks like a fairly ordinary smartphone. The features aimed at pleasing old people could just as easily be annoying. The touch-screen “buttons” on the phone’s calling function, for example, require a firmer push than those on ordinary smartphones. Only after a slight vibration do they register the chosen digit. That way, the phone avoids misdialing.

Another Fujitsu technology appears to slow down the speech of the person on the receiving end of a Raku-Raku call by removing the gaps between words and allotting more time to the actual sounds. The screen is brighter than those on ordinary smartphones, making it easier to read under direct sunlight.

There are also safety features, like a button on the phone that sends a text message to a friend or family member with the GPS coordinates of the phone’s owner in case of emergency. In its shops, Orange is providing special training on how to use the phones.

“The younger generation likes the stuff with the latest technology, but every smartphone vendor is going to have to adapt to an aging population,” Mr. Becquet said.

While Fujitsu and DoCoMo were pioneers in the development of phones for older people, they are not the only players in the field. Two European companies, Emporia Telecom in Austria and Doro in Sweden, have also been actively pursuing older users.

Doro introduced its first phone aimed at that market in 2008 and has sold four million of them since then. In the Nordic countries, 15 percent of the 65-and-older population uses Doro phones, said Jérôme Arnaud, the chief executive of the company.

While most of the Doro phones in use are old-fashioned handsets, the company introduced a basic smartphone last December and plans to roll out a more sophisticated model this autumn, Mr. Arnaud said.

The phone will use a simplified version of the Android mobile operating system, and several dozen applications have been customized for it, he added. These include a video e-mail function that lets older people skip the typing.

As for Orange and Fujitsu, the companies say they view the partnership in France as a pilot project; if the Stylistic phone catches on, they say, it will also be offered in other European markets in which Orange operates, like Britain.

“For Japanese vendors, it has been challenging to go abroad,” said Michito Kimura, an analyst at the research firm IDC, “but this technology does meet a demand.”

DealBook: Japanese Manufacturers Help Save Chip Maker Renesas

Yuriko Nakao/ReutersRenesas Eletronic’s advanced microcontroller chips are seen as important to Japanese industry.

TOKYO — When a magnitude 9 earthquake knocked out a chip-making factory at Renesas Electronics, Toyota Motor and other manufacturers dispatched hundreds of workers to help get the plant in northeastern Japan running again.

On Monday, some of Japan’s largest manufacturers pitched in again, contributing to a $1.8 billion bailout of the struggling company.

In a statement, Renesas said eight Japanese manufacturers, including Canon, Nikon, Nissan, Panasonic and Toyota, would contribute about $145 million to the deal. A government fund, the Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, will provide the rest of the aid.

The effort underscores the importance of the company’s advanced microcontroller chips to Japanese industry and the country’s reluctance to give the technology to foreign players.

The capital injection will help Renesas increase spending on the advanced microcontrollers used in cars and electronic devices, the company said. To prop up its finances, Renesas, which is based in Kawasaki, had requested an additional 50 billion yen, or $606 million, from the government.

Although Renesas rebounded swiftly from the quake and tsunami that struck Japan last year, it has been less successful in dealing with rivals like Samsung Electronics of South Korea. As Japan’s major manufacturers have stumbled in the face of tough competition and a slowing global economy, Renesas has struggled to turn a profit. On Monday, Renesas forecast a net loss of 150 billion yen for the 12 months through March 2013, after losing 62.6 billion yen in the previous 12 months.

Shares in Renesas rose 3 percent to close at 308 yen in Tokyo on Monday. The company has lost 35 percent of its market value this year.

The industry is under pressure in Japan. Elpida Memory, a Japanese manufacturer of dynamic random access memory chips, filed for bankruptcy protection in February. Elpida is being acquired by Micron Technology, a chip maker based in Boise, Idaho.

Despite the industry challenges, Japan wants to maintain control of Renesas.

In August, reports surfaced that Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company, the American private equity firm, had offered to invest as much as 100 billion yen in Renesas, which sent the company’s shares soaring. But the potential deal also raised concerns about foreign control of a company that supplies many of Japan’s leading manufacturers.

Japan’s reliance on Renesas stems, in part, from the company’s legacy.

In 2003, Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric merged their semiconductor businesses to form Renesas Technology. Then in April 2010, Renesas joined NEC Electronics, the former semiconductor division of NEC, to create the current company.

As a result, manufacturers that once employed several preferred chip suppliers ended up largely buying products from one, Renesas. In addition to automotive microcontrollers, Renesas supplies specially tailored chips for electronics companies like Canon and Ricoh.

In the bailout plan announced on Monday, Renesas said it would sell 1.25 billion new shares for 120 yen each to the government fund and the Japanese manufacturers, giving them a 69 percent stake in the chip maker. That price represents a deep discount from the company’s closing price of 308 yen on Monday in Tokyo.

The aid package follows 161 billion yen in syndicated loans Renesas secured from four Japanese banks in September, and 97 billion yen it received earlier from banks and its major shareholders. In return for that support, Renesas has promised to sell or close eight of its 18 plants in Japan within three years, and to eliminate more than 7,000 jobs from its global work force of roughly 43,000.

Fuminori Sato for The New York TimesRenesas’s Naka factory in Japan. Renesas supplies 40 percent of the world market with a crucial car computer chip.

Apple Maps Errors Send Japanese to Homegrown App

TOKYO — When Hikarie, Tokyo’s new must-visit shopping destination, opened in April, it was already old news on Mapion’s map application. An elite team at the company, which is based here, had marked the glass tower a year earlier, keeping the service a step ahead in this fast-changing city.

Mapion is one of Japan’s homegrown companies that is benefiting from Apple’s maps debacle, which has left local owners of the new iPhone 5 flummoxed over erroneous place names, long-outdated landmarks and train stations that appear to hover in the middle of the sea.

Those errors have prompted legions of users to flock to other map services, including Mapion, which has seized the day by promoting a map app it says is among the most obsessively checked and updated in Japan.

Downloads of its Mapion iPhone app, introduced in June, have jumped threefold since Apple released an update to its mobile software last week that replaced Google’s maps with its own, said Yasunori Yamagishi, who runs Mapion’s development team.

“Apple Maps has definitely been a tail wind for us,” Mr. Yamagishi said. “It goes to show how much time and effort it takes to build a map for somewhere like Japan.”

Apple’s decision to switch to its own, less-polished maps does not appear to have hurt sales of its latest iPhone, which went on sale Friday in Japan to long lines and much fanfare. But it has demonstrated, on a global scale, how Apple, a seemingly infallible company, is still prone to embarrassing missteps.

Apple’s map errors have been particularly embarrassing in hard-to-navigate Japan, where maps have become an essential smartphone feature. In Japan, most streets do not have names, and house numbers are often assigned by order of registration, not location. Before GPS and smartphones, the Japanese often went around city blocks two or three times, puzzling over well-worn maps looking for an address.

Moreover, cities like Tokyo are changing fast: its 80,000 restaurants, for example, open and close at a rapid rate amid cutthroat competition. Navitime, another map app that has benefited from Apple’s map problems, updates its data every eight hours, and replaces a third of its seven million data points every year.

Against this challenging backdrop, Apple’s maps have been a disappointment from the start. In central Tokyo, they show a busy Shinjuku subway station in the middle of serene Shinjuku Gyoen park, one of many errors diligently cataloged by Japanese bloggers. The Hinode monorail stop hovers above the waters of Tokyo Bay, which is erroneously labeled “the North Pacific.”

Hikarie, the new shopping tower, is nowhere to be found, while a museum, now closed and once run by Tokyo Electric, the operator of the ravaged nuclear power plant at Fukushima, is marked as a major landmark nearby.

Apple has said that its map service was a work in progress and would improve as more people used it.

The biggest problem with Apple’s map, Mapion’s Mr. Yamagishi said, is that much of its data appears to be drawn from OpenStreetMap Japan, a Wikipedia-like service that contains a lot of incorrect and outdated information.

Moreover, Japan uses a system of longitude and latitude that differs slightly from the global standard, and Apple may have mixed up data sources that use the two systems, Mr. Yamagishi said.

At certain points, the difference between the Japanese and international coordinate systems can come to as much as 450 meters (1,476 feet), according to Japan’s Land Ministry.

“It looks like they haven’t merged their various data sources very well. That’s a painstaking process that will take a lot of time and effort,” Mr. Yamagishi said.

Mapion has been merging data constantly since 1997, he said, and has a team of engineers who scour sources for information that might require map updates. The team got the word in November 2011 that Hikarie would open the following year, and quickly updated its data with the planned shopping tower.

Those efforts have paid off: Mapion gets a combined 86 million page views of its online map service a month from PCs and smartphones.

Japanese Companies Close Facilities in China as Tensions Rise

China’s worst outbreak of anti-Japan sentiment in decades led to demonstrations over the weekend and violent attacks on well-known Japanese companies, like the carmakers Toyota and Honda, forcing frightened Japanese into hiding and prompting the Chinese state news media to warn that trade relations could be in jeopardy.

Hong Lei, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the government would protect Japanese companies and citizens and called for protesters to obey the law.

China and Japan, which generated two-way trade of $345 billion last year, are arguing over the uninhabited islets in the East China Sea, a longstanding dispute that erupted last week when the Japanese government decided to buy some of them from a private Japanese owner.

In response, China sent six surveillance ships to the area, which contains potentially large gas reserves. On Monday, a flotilla of 1,000 Chinese fishing boats was sailing for the islands. The islands are called the Senkaku by Japan and Diaoyu by China.

The protests over the weekend mainly targeted Japanese diplomatic missions, but they also occurred at shops, restaurants and car dealerships in at least five cities. Toyota Motor and Honda Motor said arsonists had badly damaged their dealerships in the eastern port city of Qingdao.

Toyota said its factories and offices were operating as normal Monday and that it had not ordered its Japanese employees home.

Honda said it would suspend production in China starting Tuesday for two days. Fast Retailing, largest apparel retailer in Asia, said it had closed 7 of its Uniqlo outlets in China and may close 19 more.

The top Japanese general retailer, Seven & I Holdings, said it would close 13 Ito Yokado supermarkets and 198 of its 7-Eleven convenience stores in China Tuesday. Sony is discouraging nonessential travel to China.

Mazda Motor will halt production at its Nanjing factory, which it jointly operates with Chongqing Changan Automobile and Ford Motor, for four days. Nissan Motor suspended China production for two days, starting Monday.

“I want to leave,” said a Nissan executive, who declined to be named, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. “Protests near my home were horrifying over the weekend.”

The electronics maker Panasonic said one of its plants had been sabotaged by Chinese workers and would remain closed through Tuesday.

Canon, the camera and copier maker, will stop production at three of its four Chinese factories Tuesday, Japanese news media reports said, while All Nippon Airways reported a rise in cancellations on Japan-bound flights from China.

The dispute also hit the shares of Hong Kong-listed Japanese retailers on Monday, with the department store operator Aeon Stores (Hong Kong) falling to a seven-month low.

“All Japan-related shares are under selling pressure,” said Andrew To, a research director from Emperor Capital.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan, who met visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Monday, urged Beijing to ensure Japan’s people and property were protected.

Mr. Panetta said the United States would stand by its security treaty obligations to Japan but not take sides in the dispute, and urged calm and restraint on both sides.

The overseas edition of The People’s Daily, the main newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, warned that Beijing could resort to economic retaliation if the dispute festered.

“How could it be that Japan wants another lost decade, and could even be prepared to go back by two decades?” asked a front-page editorial. China “has always been extremely cautious about playing the economic card,” it said. “But in struggles concerning territorial sovereignty, if Japan continues its provocations, then China will take up the battle.”

Japanese Agency Investigating Overheating PS Vitas

It appears that some gamers are having overheating issues with their PlayStation Vita handhelds, and now an independent agency sanctioned by the Japanese government is looking into the matter. Andriasang reports that Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun has an article discussing the inquiry, which is being conducted by Japan’s National Institute of Technology and Evaluation.

The overheating problem, which has only been reported a total of 31 times to Sony, appears to happen when gamers recharge their Vitas. Twenty-three of the 31 reported issues occurred in Japan; the remaining instances happened in Sony’s other three major markets: Australia, North America and the UK.

Sony is fully cooperating with the National Insistute of Technology and Evaluation; Andriasang notes that “Sony sent a detailed listing of the various incidents” to them. “In all cases,” the article goes on, “the problem involved the connection slot between the charging unit and the Vita burning during charging. There have been no reports of injuries.”

Yomiuri Shimbun has spoken to Sony’s Japanese PR department and received word that there will be no recall of the PlayStation Vita , as apparently the handheld itself isn’t to blame. Rather, Sony “believes that the problem is with people having liquids or other objects inserted into the connection.”

We’ve reached out to Sony for further comment and clarification, and will update when we hear back.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.