By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Portable music players were once among the must-have gizmos for trend-conscious gadget lovers. However, with music-enabled mobile-phones becoming conventional and the market for portable media players (PMP) exploding due to the rising mobile television audience, it seems that MP3 players are now in danger of becoming irrelevant as wrist watches.
According to recent figures by the Korean Electronics Association (KEA), the domestic sales of MP3 players are expected to reach around 2.19 million for this year, a drop from the estimated 2.27 million sold last year.
The sales of MP3 players peaked at 2.32 million in 2006, about a four-fold increase from the 564,000 in 2002, a growth largely explained by the country's high level of broadband Internet penetration that accelerated the digital transition of the local music industry.
However, the sales of MP3 players have been declining since, with the revenue dropping from 400 billion won plus in 2005 to 350.7 billion won last year. The revenue is expected to drop further to 257.5 billion won in 2009.
The launching of mobile television services, dubbed as digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) here, as well as increasing demand for movie content, has certainly reduced the demand for music-only players as there are now fewer first-time buyers and most of the sales are for upgrades and replacements.
Even the customers who are still choosing MP3 players over other gadgets are opting mostly for cheap flash-memory products, instead of the more expensive hard-disk drive products, which partly explains the decline in revenue.
Unlike the sluggish sales of MP3 players, PMP sales have been increasingly significantly. The number of PMP sales is expected to reach 1 million in 2009, which translates to about 300 billion won in sales, more than a six-fold increase from 150,000 in 2005.