Internet Diversity Encouraged for Korean Firms
By Kim Hyun-cheol
Staff Reporter
Korean firms need to use the Internet for more varied purposes, including financial transactions and marketing, other than simply using it to send or receive e-mails, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said Tuesday.
In a recent report on the world information economy, the UNCTAD said the most common task conducted via the Internet in Korean companies, like many other developing countries, was to send and receive e-mails.
In its 2006 survey with a multiple-choice questionnaire, 88 percent of Korean companies said they used the Internet just for that purpose.
Trailing the option were information searches and research with 72 percent of respondents, and Internet banking and financial services with 64 percent. Fifty-five percent said they go online to collect information about services and goods.
However, the portion of enterprises that use the Internet to interact with government organizations and provide customer services stood at 38 percent and 35 percent, respectively. While 46 percent were getting information from public authorities, only 10 percent said they utilized the Internet to deliver their products online.
In contrast, over 80 percent of Singaporean companies used the internet for the reasons mentioned, followed by online banking with 57 percent, with only product delivery down at 37 percent.
In recent years, Korea have shown the highest rate of computer use in developing economies, but placed behind countries such as Brazil, Kazakhstan and Singapore in overall use of the Internet, according to the report.
The country's shortcomings in Internet use appears in microenterprises as only 40 percent of firms with less than 10 employees used the Internet for business, writing off nearly 100-percent usage from bigger-sized companies, it said.
Narrowed down to broadband connectivity, however, Korea remains one of the most wired countries for businesses. A greater portion of large, medium as well as small enterprises enjoy broadband access compared with the average for developed countries.
While the level of Internet use is one of the highest in the world among medium and large enterprises in Korea, it is much lower for microenterprises.
The digital divide and inequality in information technology (IT) are shrinking across the world, according to the report. Internet use has become more equally distributed and is in fact more equitably spread than fixed telephony, it said.
The UNCTAD report also showed South Korea, one of the world's top 10 information technology goods exporters, has a high reliance on information technology products in exports, taking up 15 percent of the country's total outbound shipments in 2007.
During the period from 1998 to 2007, Korea saw the third-largest increase in global market share in the industry. As of 2007, it accounted for 5.6 percent of the total IT products in the world, up from 4.2 percent a decade before.