According to KCC(Korea Communications Commission) and SK Telecom, SK Telecom, the leading mobile operator in Korea, will make online marketplace for mobile application in 2009. SK Telecom invests 100 billion won to provide the service, people can sell and buy mobile contents, by next June.

For this service, SK Telecom will provide severs, payment systems and SDK to public. Also SK Telecom is planning to invite the public to join in a prize contest for creative ideas, and support them for commercialization. SK Telecom already set up the team for this mobile contents marketplace.

While smartphone usage is increasing in Korea, SK Telecom seems to need to build its competitiveness in mobile contents through business model like Apple’s App store.

In Korea, the power of mobile operator is very huge at mobile market, so this movement of SK Telecom will affect Korean mobile market in any ways for sure. It might open Korean mobile operators’ closed policy for mobile contents. However, like SK Telecom’s previous plan for mobile contents or internet, it could make walled garden at Korean mobile market more.

Internet banking is very common in Korea. According to the Bank of Korea, the number of registered user in financial institution for internet banking is currently more than 50 million.
Meanwhile, the users of mobile banking are around 7.8 million, which is an increasing by 90% over last 12 months.

This popularity is mainly driven by the growth of VM (Virtual Machine) mobile banking users. In Korea, there are two different types of mobile banking, one is IC mobile banking and the other is VM mobile banking. IC mobile banking is using IC chip, inserted in mobile handset, to use mobile banking. Only limited mobile handsets provide IC mobile banking. However VM mobile banking is using application software, installed at mobile handset, to do internet banking. This means that you don’t need a special mobile phone to use mobile banking.

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.