July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Why bother starting a race you have no chance of winning?

That’s BlackBerry’s thinking when it comes to Japan, which may never see BlackBerry’s new phones.

“Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 devices there at this time,” a BlackBerry spokesperson said in a statement to AllThingsD. 

The confirmation comes as the BlackBerry’s Japanese market share has shrunk from 5 percent to 0.3 percent — a woefully bad piece of the pie. BlackBerry, it seems, doesn’t have much faith that it can fix the situation, so it’s giving up on Japan entirely — at least for now.

Besides sales, the other concern is the cost of translating BlackBerry 10, which are too high for BlackBerry to justify investing in, reports Japan’s Nikkei. I don’t particularly buy that explanation and something tells me BlackBerry would feel a bit different had its new phones actually stood a chance in Japan to begin with.

Fortunately, BlackBerry says that it will continue to offer support to existing BlackBerry owners, which certainly means a lot to the three or so Japanese people who still use BlackBerrys.