By Kim Tong-hyung
Smartphones are taking Korea by storm, which has telecommunications companies beaming over their inflated wallets.
In a country with more mobile phones than heads, wireless carriers have been struggling to keep growth alive with their voice business decaying quickly. However, the companies now expect their strengthened data business to compensate for this, with the explosive growth of smartphone sales injecting a serious jolt in mobile Internet usage.
According to the latest figures from the Korea Communication Commission (KCC), the mobile data traffic generated by the customers of the three local wireless carriers ― SK Telecom, KT and LG Telecom ― jumped significantly from last year’s numbers in July.
KT, the second-largest carrier and exclusive provider of the Apple iPhone handsets, enjoyed the biggest spurt in growth, with the 443.7 terabytes (TB) of data consumed by its mobile customers in July representing more than a four-fold increase from last year’s numbers.
The carrier sold nearly 900,000 iPhone 3GS handsets since releasing them in November last year and is creating significant buzz for Apple’s latest gadget, the iPhone 4. KT is also the country’s largest Internet provider and its massive Wi-Fi wireless Internet coverage, which provides cheap or free network accessibility, is apparently contributing to making mobile data services indispensible for its customers.
SK Telecom, the country’s largest wireless carrier, is benefiting from the smartphone boom as well, with the 308.1TB of mobile data used by its customers in July representing about a 230 percent growth from last year’s numbers.
SK Telecom has been responding to KT’s iPhone onslaught by launching a slew of devices powered by the Google-backed Android mobile operating system, which is considered as the industry’s best bet to challenge Apple’s supremacy in consumer smartphones.
SK Telecom’s most convincing weapon has been the Samsung Electronics Galaxy S, an Android-based device of which the carrier has managed to sell more than a million. LG Telecom, the smallest carrier, saw the data consumption of its users rise more than 114 percent to 121.7TB in July.
Smartphones have been a hard sell in past years due to the high prices of the devices and lack of a content ecosystem. However, with a wave of intriguing devices such as the iPhone and Galaxy S hitting the market, smartphones are suddenly going mass market.
As of August, the three mobile carriers combined to sell more than 3.67 million smartphones, which represents nearly a 10-fold increase from the amount they sold before November last year, or before the iPhones were unleashed locally.
SK Telecom managed to sell 2.13 million smartphones through August, compared to 1.32 million devices sold by KT. LG Telecom managed to sell around 214,000 smartphones.
The inconsistency between the smartphone sales and mobile data consumption of SK Telecom and KT indicates that the average iPhone users spend significantly more time on the mobile Internet than the users of other smartphones. KT reported a narrowed gap between the average revenue per user (ARPU) for voice and data during the second quarter.