To some observers, the South Korean market was relatively late to the party in terms of the Smartphone revolution with the popular devices only becoming fashionable in the Asian country a couple of years ago. While countries like the USA and Great Britain have been selling Smartphone handsets by the millions for quite a few years now (largely down to the release of the original iPhone), South Korea’s love affair with the phones is a new occurrence and one that is taken the country by storm.
Only 500,000 Smartphone’s were sold in the country two years and that rose to 10m at the beginning of this year with the figure more the doubling in the space of 8 months to over 20 million by October 2011. The consumers in Korea benefit greatly from a efficient free Wi-Fi service in many areas and the number of Smartphone subscribers is expected to rise again to 30m by the first half of 2012 and then go up again to 40m by the end of next year – quite an achievement in a country that is home to 49m residents.
The director of the Korea Communications Commission’s telecommunications policy planning division, Lee Sang-Hak, even went as far to suggest that South Korea will overtake the United States in terms of the number of Smartphone users by early 2012 and much of this in down to the fact that the country is home to manufacturing giant Samsung that is the world’s second largest manufacturer of the devices behind Apple.
