Japan March mobile phone shipments up

Mobile phone shipments in Japan rose 27.7 percent in March from a year earlier due to a surge in sales of handsets that work on high-speed third-generation (3G) networks, an industry group said on May 17.
Overall shipments for the fiscal year from last April to the end of March totalled 48.672 million units, up 8.7 percent from the prior fiscal year, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) said in a report.
3G handset sales hit a record high in March, jumping 58.3 percent to 5.24 million units to account for nearly 90 percent of the total, while shipments of older, second-generation phones fell 54.5 percent to 607,000 units, JEITA said.