Softbank, the aggressively-run mobile telecoms and internet conglomerate, will become the first Japanese carrier to offer the Apple iPhone.

The deal will, for the first time, take the iPhone into the world’s most sophisticated market for mobile phone handsets. The design, the feel and the multi-media functions of the Apple may have wowed consumers in the US and Europe, but Softbank faces a huge challenge taking the device to the Japanese.

Will the iPhone, investors wonder, stand up as a must-have toy in a market where almost all the handsets on sale already show television, can surf the internet, play music and video and – perhaps most critically – pay via internal chips for everything from train fares to haute couture handbags?

Even before that question is answered, though, the move is likely to be notched up as the latest marketing coup for Masayoshi Son, the tycoon who bought the failing Japan operations of Vodafone in 2006 and vowed to take on the former state incumbent, NTT DoCoMo.

After taking over the operations and ditching the Vodafone brand, Mr Son quickly showed where the British giant had gone so badly wrong, hitting the Japanese consumer with a dizzying array of cheap call packages and payment plans that left DoCoMo and KDDI for dust.

And, ever the marketer, Mr Son turned to Hollywood glitz to push his handsets by engaging Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt to front the advertising campaign. It was an old but effective strategy. In 2007, Softbank comfortably triumphed in the race for new subscribers, where Vodafone had haemorrhaged customers for years.

The arrival of the phones in Japan, scheduled for this autumn, will add a new layer of ferocity to a highly competitive market – analysts said that the handset would “inevitably” provoke an intensified summer price war as KDDI and DoCoMo look to woo consumers who might otherwise be planning to wait for the iPhone.

The three dominant Japanese mobile operators remain locked in an increasingly bitter war on prices and handsets in a market that has effectively reached a plateau of 100 million subscribers. Spoilt for choice by this rivalry, Japanese consumers, meanwhile, have become extraordinarily picky about their phones: if a single aspect of design or function is deemed clunky, the handset will fail.

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