Tag Archive for 'Korea'

South Korea Explores New Paths

Published
by
ron
on April 9, 2005
in Global Strategy and International Business
. 0 Comments

South Korea New Paths


In 1960, South Korea had only one telephone for every 300 people - barely one tenth of the world average at the time. Today, more than 90% of households have a fixed-line phone, three times the world average.

Moreover, three-quarters of the population carry mobile phones, which mean that pretty well everyone has one, apart from tiny tots and a few elderly people. With government encouragement and the benefit of a densely populated, mainly urban environment, South Korea has been relatively easy to wire up. The country boasts one of the highest internet-penetration rates in the world, with more than 31m of the 48m population now having access to the web, most of them via high-speed services. Apartment blocks display government notices by the front door certifying the speed of their internet connection.

Those connections are about to get even faster. In January, the government licensed the country’s three main telecoms firms, SK Telecom, KT and Hanaro, to offer a new high-speed wireless internet service called WiBro. From next year, this will allow mobile users to surf the internet at much higher speeds than they do now, as well as more reliably. Somewhat alarmingly, the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) says it will work even in a car travelling at 60km an hour.

For the country’s consumer-electronics makers, this vibrant home market is an invaluable development laboratory. Samsung Electronics, South Korea’s biggest consumer-electronics company, has already produced a mobile phone especially for watching high-quality video. Its rival, LG Electronics, has even unveiled one with a built-in personal video recorder, which automatically switches to “record” if the user needs to take a call. Lots of other new gadgets are coming, including phones that can read the radio-frequency identification tags that will eventually replace the barcodes attached to goods. These phones, says the MIC, could be used to check the expiry date of fresh produce, say, or pick up a signal from a poster advertising a new movie, which would then prompt you to download a preview.

Furthermore, walk into the experimental coffee bar at the Ministry of MIC’s offices in Seoul, and the screen of a handset lights up with the menu. You can order two cappuccinos, pay electronically and receive a receipt, all on the handset. Mobile phones are already configured for some basic ecommerce activities such as downloading music, and in Asia a few can already be used to make some purchases in shops. “There is a future, not too far away, when the only thing you will need to leave home with is your mobile phone, because it will be your wallet and your key and all the things it already is,” says David Wheldon, global director of marketing and brand communications for Britain’s Vodafone, the world’s biggest mobile operator.

There seems little doubt that South Koreans will flock to use many of these services: the MIC expects the number of WiBro subscribers to rise to over 9m within six years. But the way the locals use these new technologies may not translate perfectly to other countries. Watching video on your mobile phone already looks like a winner in Japan, because many Japanese face long commutes on public transport. But if you are stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 405 on your way to work in Los Angeles, you might do better to tune your phone to pick up high-quality satellite radio instead.

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South Korea’s Consumer Power

Published
by
ron
on April 8, 2005
in Global Strategy and International Business
. 0 Comments

South Korea Consumer Power


South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world. That is why Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, the biggest online auctioneer, sees the country as a “window into the possibilities” of what might happen when high-speed broadband services are widely adopted in other places too.

Saturday morning in Myeong-dong, and the huge shopping district in the centre of Seoul, South Korea’s capital, prepares for a long day and night. As the hawkers move in with their barrows, a man selling fried squid sets up his stall next to a woman displaying shawls with Louis Vuitton logos. Real or fake, just about every fashion brand in the world can be bought here, if not from the hawkers, then certainly from the hundreds of stores, shopping malls or the massive Lotte department store. A solitary preacher stands outside a Starbucks singing hymns, as if to steer the swelling crowds away from the path of Mammon. Eventually he packs up and leaves, drowned out by the music blasting from the sound systems of trendy boutiques. This is consumerism at its most strident. So where is the internet?

It is all around. Start with shops, many of which display signs showing their website address. Then watch the shoppers, especially the younger ones. They have acquired new skills: walking through a crowd while studying the screen on their mobile phone, or examining a rail of clothes while using their thumb to text a friend. Some will also be checking their bank accounts, getting sports news, keeping track of an online computer game, or downloading a new ring tone or avatar-a cartoon-like character that will appear as their digital representative on mobile phone screens and in online games. Plenty will also be listening to music downloaded from the internet.

They are what marketing people call generation Y, a group born between 1980 and 1994. They have already turned some clothing, drinks and electronics brands into winners and losers. They have grown up with more choice than any other generation. They are busy and know how to shop around, both online and offline.

More than any other group, the 18- to 34- year-olds access the internet from places other than home, school or work, especially if they are using a mobile phone. They seem to want to be connected wherever they go. They also see the internet as one of their most important sources of information and entertainment.

So the group to watch closely is the younger generation. Young people are the most avid users of the internet because they have grown up with its benefits. For this age group, the internet will remain the most dominant medium in their lives, as it will be for the following generation - who even at primary school are using the web to do their homework.

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The Next Generation Mobile Phones

Published
by
ron
on March 24, 2005
in Global Strategy
. 1 Comment

Next Generation Mobile Phones

Last month, Samsung has launched a new phone, the sph-A800, that uses its built-in two-megapixel camera as a business-card scanner. You take a photo of a business card, and optical character recognition (OCR) software scans the image for text which you can then insert into the relevant fields of a new address-book entry.

The Japanese arm of Amazon, an online retailer, offers a service that allows subscribers to carry out a cheeky price check while browsing a bookstore. Snap a picture of the bar-code on a book or CD, and a quick over-the-air look-up will tell you if Amazon’s price is lower. Japanese consumers can even use the technology to find out how fresh their fish is. Scan the bar-code on its packaging, and a text message arrives in seconds detailing when it was caught, on which boat, and even the name of the fisherman who reeled it in.

The next step is to enable phones to read two-dimensional bar-codes, which are small squares containing an assortment of black and white dots. Although an unfamiliar sight in most countries, such bar-codes are already quite common in Japan, where they are known as quick-response (QR) codes. Many people have QR-codes on business cards, says Mr Fasol, so that their contact details can be quickly uploaded to a phone. Other applications include buying tickets for a concert or listening to a sample song on a CD, just by scanning the QR-code on a poster or a CD case. A code can contain an internet address, and scanning it prompts the phone to load the relevant page. The same technology is being promoted in America by firms such as Scan-buy, in New York, and NeoMediaTechnologies, in Fort Myers, Florida.

Moreover, when travellers scan the code, software on their phones interprets it and calls up a web page providing up-to-the-minute information about when the next bus will arrive. There is no need to key in a fiddly internet address. Semacode has also teamed up with Qwest, an American telecoms firm, to run a series of virtual treasure hunts. Hundreds of children rampage through a city centre in teams, hunting for Semacodes and claiming them by taking snapshots of them.

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