Abandon all hope...

...all ye who enter here.

Samsung Quits Japan's Consumer Electronics Market
Chosun Ilbo

Samsung Electronics has decided to stop selling consumer electronics in Japan with the exception of monitors, the company said Friday.

The company sold MP3 players, LCD TVs and DVD players through websites and some retailers in Japan but sales have been lackluster.

Samsung Electronics said consumer electronics account for around just one percent of its total sales in Japan, which lean heavily towards semiconductors and LCD panels...

Consumer electronics manufacturing is a miserably low-margin business to be in in the first place. An electronics retailer would furthermore have to be daft to tie up with Samsung, endangering its relationships with major Japanese manufacturers. To this add the fact that consumers still tend to buy their electronics and white goods according to their employers's directives, that is to say from the approved keiretsu manufacturer...

(I once bought a SONY digital camera because it had the features and qualities I desired. No problem until, in a moment of inattention, I whipped it out to photograph an office event...an act for which even today I have yet to be forgiven.)

...and you have the makings of a failed long-term concerted attempt to enter the market.

Now if the president of South Korea had been Best Friends Forever with the Japanese government or had been friends with the leaders of even a particularly powerful faction of the LDP, maybe something could have been worked out...