Kiko Co.

White Paper on the Internet in Japan 2002 2001 2000 1999

What is the present position of the Internet in Japan, the world's second largest commercial market?

The current exchange rate between the Japanese Yen and US dollar is around US$1 = JPY118.00

Description

How widely is the Internet used in Japan?

The current population of Japan is about 120 million. About 45% have used the Internet as of 2002. This represents a growth of 141.55% over the figure for 2002. Recently, the number of Internet users connected to the broadband services such as ADSL, CATV FTTH has increased.

Statistical information on individual users

[ Time of day of peak use/Duration of using the Internet ]
Average usage time is under 10 hours per week, but is tending to rise gradually. Additionally, the number of users having a constant connection has increased.


[ Transmission speed/Connection mode ]
The most commonly used transmission speeds are 56 kbps and 64 kbps. There are, however, more users having broadband connections with at 1.5 Mbps and 8.0 Mbps than before, and users more and more migrate to the ADSL or CATV connections.

[ Usage of Internet services ]
E-mail is the most commonly used service. It also should be noted that downloading music and e-book to users' hardwares is the top of the services which users want to use in future.

[ Browsers/E-mail client software ]
Microsoft products exclusively occupy the IT market share.

[ Music, graphic and movie contents ]
With expansion of the broadband connection, users enjoy more and more various applications supporting audio and animation. Approx. 45.4% of the Internet users access the audio/animation contents. In the market of such applications, Media player and Realplayer are dominants.

[ Items purchased via online shopping ]
"Magazines/books" and "Train and airline tickets" are high on the list in each category. In the "Planned purchases of goods and services" category, "computer-related goods","computer software" and "Charged Information services" are most purchased.


[ Payment terms for online shopping ]
The prefered payment method is by credit card. It is noticeable that "Payment via convenience stores" has doubled to 21.3% this year.

[ Usage of search engines ]
Yahoo! Japan is the top dominant of the marketplace, followed by Goo and Google which have gradually increased the share than before.

Statistical information on corporations

[ Extent of Internet use ]
The percentage of corporations responding that they currently make use of the Internet as a business tool has further to 96.6% this year.

[ Transmission speed/Connection mode ]
The most used transmission speeds are 1.5 Mbps and 8 Mbps. The CATV and ADSL/xDSL connection modes are both increasing rapidly in comparison with last year. High-speed connection via leased lines is becoming the main connection mode.

[ Use of own domain names ]
86.9% of all Japanese corporations have already registered their own domain name. 20.9% of all Japanese corporations use oversea domain names.

[ Website content ]
Most corporate websites have contained and now contain information on the company. However, interactive contents, such as the purchase and ordering of products/services and customer support for products/services have increasingly been added year by year.

[ Budgets for corporate websites ]
Japanese companies realize it is important to have a corporate website. However, only one-third of them answered that they had set aside a budget for creating and maintaining a website.

[ Types of servers currently running ]
Usage of the mail servers has finally reached 100% this year. Corporations run one and more servers in order to separate them for internal and external usages.

[ Usage of Internet for B2B purposes ]
29.7% of organizations apply Internet for B2B purposes. They currently use the B2B mainly in order to make their purchasing/ordering procudures more efficient.


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