Samsung Attempting To Crack Japanese Market By Removing Logo From Galaxy S6 And S6 Edge

Samsung's Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge — the very essence of HOT hardware in the smartphone space today — will go on sale in Japan this Thursday (April 23) without the company's logo on the devices, and will instead sport the monikers 'Docomo Galaxy' and 'au Galaxy', named after their Japanese telecom carriers.

Samsung made the decision to white-label their raging new entries into the smartphone space amid persistent rumors that the company was planning to entirely pull its smartphone business out of Japan. The company has had a difficult time trying to establish any kind of a foothold in the Land of the Rising Sun, and with only a sliver of the Japan's smartphone market share (5.6%) it currently sits in the #5 position behind Apple (40.8%) and Japanese players Sony (18.1%), Sharp (12.4%), Fujitsu (8.8%). This despite having a 25% share of the smartphone market worldwide. 

A company spokesperson speaking in Seoul on Sunday said, "We think the Galaxy brand has been well established in Japan.", and declined to elaborate any further. 

The iPhone notwithstanding, consumers in Japan have a strong predilection for buying locally-produced products. Coupled with the longstanding animosity between Japan and Samsung's native Korea, this easily explains the company's decision to leech their new Android devices of brand identity. Stripped of the company logo, Samsung hopes that superior tech and build quality will be enough to overcome the nationalistic challenges and put their products into the hands of more Japanese consumers. And this no-name gambit by Samsung isn't relegated solely to the new phones themselves, but also to their packaging, all associated marketing materials, and even the Samsung Facebook page (renaming it in Japan to ‘Galaxy Mobile Japan’). 

The idea of Samsung someday making the sweeping decision to abandon the oh-so-lucrative Japanese smartphone market is rooted in precedent, that being the move by the company to withdraw its TV business from Japan just a year after becoming the global television manufacturing leader in 2006. Samsung was only able to garner 0.1% of the Japanese TV market in 2007, and made the decision to entirely pull out of the country with the intent of blunting the negative effect that poor performance was having on its image as the world's leading TV producer.