Smartphone Adoption to Reach 60 percent in South Korea

LG Smartphones, Photo: Yonhap

Korean news agency Yonhap news is reporting that South Korea’s smart phone user base is about to surpass the 30 million mark. The report cites industry sources [1] saying that the country’s local telecoms have reported a total of 29.97 million smartphone subscribers.

So far the market leader is SK Telecom (SEO:017670; NYSE:SKM) with 14.72 million users, followed by KT (NYSE:KT) and LG Uplus (KRX:032640) with 9.4 million and 5.78 million respectively. That’s pretty remarkable considering that the nation’s population just surpassed 50 million in June.

In terms of LTE adoption, SK Telecom recently passed 4 million subscribers, while KT and LG have about 1.4 and 3 million a piece.

For companies and startups looking at expanding your game or app to Asia, Korea is certainly a market to look at given its affinity for smartphones. When I spoke with Angry Birds’ maker Rovio a few days ago, they told me that their game has more total downloads in Korea than there are smartphone users in Japan.

Looking at the growth of mobile in the country as a whole (feature phones included) shows the total mobile subscriber base, as of 2011, to be about 52.5 million, with an astounding 108.5 subscribers per 100 inhabitants [2]. [Via The Next Web]