Korea's mobile market saturating
Several newspapers reported yesterday that Korea's mobile market is quickly heading towards saturation.
The Korea Information Society Development Institute, an affiliate of the Ministry of Information and Communication states that by the end of 2004, the number of the country's cell phone users may rise to 37.54 million from 33.59 million a year ago. The number of mobile phone users in Korea will probably reach 39.43 million, or 81% of the population, by 2008.
Does this make sense? This would mean that this year, the growth rate reaches 12%, while the growth rate until 2008 would be around 1.2% - there is no argument in the article justifying this extremely rapid decline from double to low single digits. In addition, there are enough countries, where the penetration rate reaches more than 100%, since some users have more than one mobile phone.
Nevertheless - this change, however pronounced, puts lots of strains on the companies. They need to put in content into the mobile phones so that users keep ringing up. This means that they need to develop capabilities in alliance managements - forming alliances with companies that develop those contents. In addition, the mindset in the companies need to change - you have a different approach to a business that is growing fast compared to a business that is growing slow - so transition management is required as well - and there are plenty more challenges. Again, we are interested to see, how the powerhouses in Korea are going about this transformations.
The Korea Information Society Development Institute, an affiliate of the Ministry of Information and Communication states that by the end of 2004, the number of the country's cell phone users may rise to 37.54 million from 33.59 million a year ago. The number of mobile phone users in Korea will probably reach 39.43 million, or 81% of the population, by 2008.
Does this make sense? This would mean that this year, the growth rate reaches 12%, while the growth rate until 2008 would be around 1.2% - there is no argument in the article justifying this extremely rapid decline from double to low single digits. In addition, there are enough countries, where the penetration rate reaches more than 100%, since some users have more than one mobile phone.
Nevertheless - this change, however pronounced, puts lots of strains on the companies. They need to put in content into the mobile phones so that users keep ringing up. This means that they need to develop capabilities in alliance managements - forming alliances with companies that develop those contents. In addition, the mindset in the companies need to change - you have a different approach to a business that is growing fast compared to a business that is growing slow - so transition management is required as well - and there are plenty more challenges. Again, we are interested to see, how the powerhouses in Korea are going about this transformations.
posted by Andreas @ 12:30 pm
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