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South Korea Telecommunications Report Q1 2011
Business Monitor International, Jan 2011, Pages: 81
South Korea Telecommunications Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, telecommunication associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on South Korea's telecommunications industry.
In this quarter’s update of the South Korean telecoms market we have provided the latest published data by the three major operators – SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus – for the mobile market ended September2010, as well as for fixed line and broadband from the Korea Communications Commission. This has ledBMI to revise its forecasts, which have been extended this quarter to 2015.
Focus this quarter has been on driving up the number of smartphone handsets, with market leader SK Telecom announcing it would increase smartphone offerings this year by 30%. The operator is planningto offer its customers the Samsung Bada platform, and it is in talks with Nokia over offering theSymbian operating software (OS). Furthermore, Google’s Android platform is being offered. Theoperator will deploy 10 new smartphones in Q410, bringing the total to 24 models for the entire year. SKTelecom is faced with aggressive competition from KT, which is the exclusive provider of the AppleiPhone handset.
LG Uplus (formerly LG Telecom) was late to enter the smartphone market, but will largely focus on the Android platform. The company has set itself the ambitious target of 40% of its total handsets beingsmartphones by 2010. To make itself attractive to customers, the operator announced the introduction of anumber of new applications such as mobile internet voice calls and Facebook applications.
There were a total of 50.216mn mobile subscribers as of September 2010, following 606,000 net additions in the quarter, which was down from 631,000 and 1.035mn net additions in Q210 and Q110respectively. BMI forecasts that the final quarter of 2010 will also once again see relatively weak growthso that by the end of the year, we expect there to be 50.516mn subscribers. Over the next five years ended2015, we anticipate average annual growth of 1.7% to end on a total of 54.822mn and a penetration rateof 111%.
The maturity of the broadband market, with around 16.718mn subscribers as of May 2010 (latest published data), is still seeing growth emerge largely from wireless. This is expected to be fuelled furtherafter KT announced the commercial launch of the Apple iPad on November 30 2010. The operatoralready had around 40,000-50,000 units pre-ordered before the final weeks of commercial launch and hadbeen expected to double the number of pre-orders to 100,000 units.
Like that of the smartphone handset market, rival SK Telecom has also sought to launch rival devices to the iPad such as the Samsung Galaxy tablet computer. While SK Telecom currently has an exclusiveagreement to offer the Galaxy, Samsung is also in talks with LG Uplus, which is also looking to enter themarket.
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