As 2007 comes to an end a lot of new years lists are coming out. I just want to comment the selection of person of the year 2007 by iNews24, one of the largest IT news providers in Korea. They selected Son Ju Eun who is the CEO of the biggest e-learning company here, Megastudy. In 2000 was 300 000 USD invested and today is the stock value up to over 2 billion USD (registered on the stock market in 2004). That makes it the fourth biggest company on KSDAQ (The Korean version of NASDAQ) after NHDN, LG Telecom and Hanaro Telecom.

Why is this interesting? Well, first of all does this show the enormous potential of e-learning and how it can be very well utilized in a country like Korea. With only 160 teachers they manage to control 2 400 classes with a total member amount of around 2 million students. There are low limitations on time and place and it is obvious that there is a big virtual market for education. Megastudy has been focusing on preparations for the entrance exams to university (but also high school and middle school in general) while others, such as Credu with its roots in Samsung has managed to penetrate the business side.

After that short introduction to the educational industry in Korea, I want to wish all my readers a Happy New Year! I hope you keep reading the blog and that you will find it useful and interesting. I am always eager to hear your comments and ideas on Korean TMT.

Did you give your child an iPod for Christmas or maybe you received an iPhone yourself? Congratulations, you just supported the Korean industry. According to a recent Korean news report does an iPod Touch consist of up to 40% of products from Samsung or other Korean companies like Highnics.

Also the very much hyped iPhone shares many of the parts of an iPod Touch. With an estimated sales of around 9 million iPod Touch the coming year this means heavy revenue for Samsung. Especially since some of there more expensive parts (such as the flash memory) are from the company, they will receive more than 20% of the total production cost of around 150 USD per item. The customer price is around 300 USD.

Korea is traditionally a very strong mp3-player producing country and Korean companies like iRiver and Samsung was a long time dominating the flash memory based market. However, since the iPod phenomenon arose they have lost much of their own market share while the Koreans have moved to other forms of portable media players. But since Samsung is covering the market share loss by providing parts to Apple, Korea remains strong under the hood.

A major strangler for the growth of VoIP in Korea so far has been that people who want the service have to change their number. The for Koreans odd prefix 070- has been considered something unprofessional and the quality has been questioned. Traditionally the prefix is important in Korea and have been showing which service provider you are using or where you live. Many are very brand loyal, particularly towards SK which is the company behind the 011- prefix.

However, the only christmas gift for VoIP was not only the possibility with number portability. The tariff for using the copper lines for the VoIP providers will be lowered with 30% making VoIP even more economically beneficial. These two changes will most likely increase the pace of the evolution into a VoIP based voice communication in Korea. However, 2008 will not be the year when VoIP becomes dominant in the fixed side but it might be the year for a takeoff. We can expect the big breakthrough somewhere around 2010.

Today, VoIP constitutes about 10% of the total fixed phone market but all of the heavy players have VoIP options. KT, LG, SK (including Hanaro) and other SO’s are all offering some sort of bundled services. They are also starting to focus more on the private customers after been emphasizing on the business customers.