Mobile Korea

SK Telecom has announced that user number of “Mobile Cyworld” users has exceeded 1 million, being far ahead of other mobile services like Mobile Daum Café (0.14 million) or Mobile Naver Blog (0.1 million). At the same time the average monthly page view of mobile CyWorld is 350 million which results in the fact that on average a user visits mobile CyWorld eleven times a day or basically once an hour.

65% of the users are female and 50% of the users are between 19-25 years old. Besides writing messages to their friends’ “Minihompy”, sending pictures which have been taken by mobile to their own “Minihompy”. Over a million photos are sent like that monthly resulting in nice data related revenue for SK Telecom. These are usage patterns other MNOs and service providers dream of. Due to age segment specific marketing activities SK Telecom is able to design customized service offerings which add significant value to the customer experience. At the same time it is combined with adequate pricing, e.g. it has a flatrate for usage of mobile CyWorld being very attractive to the younger target group.

Recently the National Internet Development Agency of Korea conducted a survey about mobile internet usage among 3000 Koreans aged 12-59. In the last year approx. 27% of all participants used mobile internet at least once a month and 22% used their mobile to access it. Moreover Koreans use mobile internet quite long, with almost 40% of the users staying online for more than 5 minutes. So far only around 3% use mobile broadband like WCDMA or WiBro but 25% intend to use mobile broadband in the future. However so far especially Wibro has not been performing all too well yet.

The top three reasons to use mobile internet are the ability to access it wherever (78%) or whenever (62%) and in order to just “kill the time” (56%). Most participants use it for entertainment purposes (92%), especially downloading ringtones, listenting to streamed music of for games, followed by commercial services (65%), such as MMS, e-mail and accessing CyWorld. Lastly 41% of the participants who are not using mobile internet at the moment are planning to use it in the future resulting in an expected usage of 66%. This perspective truly looks very promising for MNOs and service providers. However one key challenge will be to offer innovative services in order to attract and maintain users. So for MNOs in the Western world which try to educate users to use data related services more intensively Korea is a good window into the future to learn which services are embraced and which are not.