Skip to main content

South Koreans are Adopting Mobile Money Services

South Korea is already known for its leadership in landline broadband service adoption. Many of the nation's residents are also pioneers of mobile broadband service adoption.

Nearly half (47 percent) of South Koreans polled intend to purchase a smartphone within the next six months, according to the results of a consumer survey conducted this year by ABI Research.

South Koreans already own an average of 1.6 mobile devices each, and are among the world's most enthusiastic consumers of new mobile technologies, upgrading their devices frequently and utilizing many forward-looking applications.

"South Koreans are keen adopters of mobile money services," notes practice director Neil Strother at ABI.

They're using mobile devices to do banking (a very high 69 percent of respondents), and pay bills (40 percent).

Curiously, though, most South Koreans have little confidence in the security of their mobile phones: only 7 percent believed they were completely or very secure, while 59 percent rated security as low or nonexistent.

Either they rationally accept heightened risk as the price of engaging in activities they find useful, or, like many of us, would rather not think about it.

South Koreans respond well to mobile advertising. According to Strother, "Nearly 45 percenet of those polled reported having clicked on a mobile advertisement at least once; of those, 40 percent received a coupon as a result, and a significant 27 percent actually downloaded or purchased content as a result."

Popular posts from this blog

The Billions Bet on Tentative AI Demand

Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....