As 2007 has come to an end, it is a good time to be updated on the Korean mobile market. The market is rather stable and the market shares are rather intact between the three big ones in Korean Telecom - SKT, KTF and LGT.

SKT was fined a couple of years ago due to legislative problems for having a market share above 50% and they are therefore restricted to grow any more (which also means they are having serious international ambitions for the moment). However, as the number of users still increase (mobile penetration is around 90% today) they managed to increase the customer base with more than a million. 2007 was a good year for the mobile market in general and the users increased more than before. However, as the amount of users soon will be peaking, the fight among the existing users will be tougher. LGT are the price pressers and they launched a service of free calls among its customers (for a small monthly fee) in 2007 which forced SKT and KTF to include similar price changes. LGT is not the one with the most new customers in absolute numbers, but they still managed to steal a percent from KTF. KTF are emphasizing the HSPA service very much for the moment.

For more information about the Korean mobile market, feel free to contact me or my company Veyond

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.