Internet usage in Korea

Korea is a powerhouse in the Internet sphere, something, that other countries can look upon as a best practice to benchmark against (if benchmarking is seen as a positive process).

Now again, it has been shown that the country meets the perception. "Three-quarters of Koreans between the ages of seven and 65 use the Internet. In the survey, 73.8 percent of respondents said they use the Internet more than once a month. Factored to the whole population, that would mean 29.88 million people, 932,000 or 3.2 percent more than last March. The most commonly used services were search, news, games and e-mail. The services that have grown the most were shopping, auction and mini homepages, which were especially popular among housewives.

About half or 49.1 percent of Internet users had experienced e-commerce, 1.3 percentage points more than in the last survey. However, the average money they spent dropped by W2,000 to W50,000. The population of wireless Internet connection users stood at 13.2 percent or 5.34 million, a 1 percent increase."

While it is clear that the development cannot endlessly continue, questions arise on where the next development will come from. Korea needs to replace this business model with the next, before the runners up start replacing its success. But so far, they have the ideas to stay ahead.

(By Asia Business Consulting)