Korea's IoT market grows to 5 trillion won

By Choi Sung-jin

The “era of IoT (Internet of Things)” is rapidly approaching, when people can check their health and control electricity and temperature away from home – if they have a smartphone.

LG Uplus said Tuesday the number of households who subscribed to its home IoT service has surpassed 100,000 for the first time. “About 500 families are subscribing a day, on average,” a company official said. “The actual number of users might be twice as high as that of households.”

Men in their 30s accounted for the largest share of clients, with 17 percent, followed by men in their 40s (16 percent) and women in their 40s (15 percent), it said. Most of the households are in large cities and surrounding provinces, indicating families living in apartments tend to fit their homes with IoT equipment.

Almost 50 percent of subscribers used the “IoT plug” service, which enables them to shut off standby power. Also popular were sensors detecting the opening of windows (46 percent), IoT switch (10 percent) and energy meter (10 percent). The company is trying to diversify services to remote-controlled air-conditioning and air-purifying functions by taking into account weather information and the concentration of fine dust, it said.

According to the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, domestic sales of the IoT industry stood at 4.81 trillion won ($3.96 billion) last year, up 28 percent from 2014. Sales from manufacturing related equipment took up 45.8 percent of the total, followed by networking (30.9 percent), providing services (12.6 percent) and platforms (10.7 percent).

Among IoT sectors, individual service areas such as smart home and health care took up the largest share with 31 percent, the ministry said.