Mobile phone subscribers exceed 50 million

The nation’s number of mobile phone subscribers has topped 50 million mark, surpassing the country's population for the first time, the telecom regulator said Wednesday.

Mobile phone population stood at 50.05 million as of Sept. 8, exceeding the country's estimated population of 48.8 million, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said in a statement.

The mobile-phone ownership rate, which gauges the rate of a nation's population to its wireless users, reached 102.4 percent, it said, meaning there are 12 mobile handsets for every 10 people in Korea.

The 50-million mark was broken 26 years after South Korea launched wireless phone service in 1984. The country passed 40 million subscribers in 2006.

The KCC said that smartphone subscribers in South Korea numbered 3.67 million, or 7.4 percent of all wireless subscribers, as of the end of August.

It forecast that the booming demand for smartphones and tablet PCs, sparked by the local debut of Apple Inc.'s iPhone in 2009, will further boost the number of wireless service subscribers down the road.