Android the open source operating system for mobile devices is cheered throughout Western media. It is considered as a milestone which will lower production cost for handsets (and thus for consumers), enlarge potential markets for developers (because they will not need to focus on one manufacturer) and at the same time educate consumers to finally embrace mobile data services. In my point of view the impact on the Korean market will be smaller. My expectation is that especially handset manufacturers will profit from lower hardware requirements, shorter production cycles and thus lower cost. This is why both major handset manufacturers like Samsung and LG have joined the alliance. However Android is not very likely to affect consumers as much as it will on Western markets.

In contrast to Europe Korean MNOs do not fight for market share but try to increase ARPU this results in the fact that data related services are much more sophisticated than in the rest of the World. Already nowadays with approx. 26% of SK Telecoms revenues coming from data related services, customers are “educated” to use them. Moreover SK Telecom has recently partially opened its interface for third party developers and more importantly services which will be developed for Android are likely to be inspired by Korean existing value added services. Due to the sophistication of the Korean mobile market Western developers can use it as a visionary ground in which they can observe what the latest developments in value added services are and which services really add value. So developers who want to join the “gold rush” which Google has announced recently (with a total of 10 million USD for promising Android applications) should have a close look on the Korean mobile market.

Recently the National Internet Development Agency of Korea conducted a survey about mobile internet usage among 3000 Koreans aged 12-59. In the last year approx. 27% of all participants used mobile internet at least once a month and 22% used their mobile to access it. Moreover Koreans use mobile internet quite long, with almost 40% of the users staying online for more than 5 minutes. So far only around 3% use mobile broadband like WCDMA or WiBro but 25% intend to use mobile broadband in the future. However so far especially Wibro has not been performing all too well yet.

The top three reasons to use mobile internet are the ability to access it wherever (78%) or whenever (62%) and in order to just “kill the time” (56%). Most participants use it for entertainment purposes (92%), especially downloading ringtones, listenting to streamed music of for games, followed by commercial services (65%), such as MMS, e-mail and accessing CyWorld. Lastly 41% of the participants who are not using mobile internet at the moment are planning to use it in the future resulting in an expected usage of 66%. This perspective truly looks very promising for MNOs and service providers. However one key challenge will be to offer innovative services in order to attract and maintain users. So for MNOs in the Western world which try to educate users to use data related services more intensively Korea is a good window into the future to learn which services are embraced and which are not.

Based on requests we receive and also monitoring global media one area of huge interest is mobile TV. In most parts of the world it is a feature soon to be introduced by broadcasters or MNO’s, e.g. BBC and Channel 4 have recently announced to offer mobile TV in the upcoming year.

In order to build a strong value proposition as well as a solid business model we strongly believe that interested parties should utilize the know-how gathered on the Korean mobile TV market. In Korea mobile TV has been present for about 2 years and according to Berg Insight Japan and Korea account for approx. 78% of the world’s mobile TV viewers.

Currently we are working on a report focusing on the business side of mobile TV, which will highlight the lessons learnt from the Korean market. It will soon be published and will be available as a free download after registration on our website.