Description

The South Korean mobile communications market has continued to grow since 2010, mainly driven by surging demand for smartphones and increasing flat-rate pricing plans. The mobile communications market grew at 12.7 percent in 2010 to generate $19,455 million in total service revenue. Mobile data average revenue per user (ARPU) accounted for 22.1 percent of total aggregate ARPU in 2010, and this is likely to go up to 47.2 percent by 2016 due to high uptake of smartphones. However, due to market saturation and decrease in ARPU, fixed broadband market is likely to decline by 2016. xDSL is rapidly being replaced with FTTx due to users’ strong preference for the latter.