Voice of the Smartphone User: South Korea

We recently went out into the streets of Seoul and looked around for people with smartphones in their hands - it wasn’t hard - and asked them questions about how they use their smartphone, how often they use it and what their life would be like without it. We heard from people young and old, and their answers were unsurprisingly consistent: they can barely imagine life without their smartphones.

We thought the video would be interesting to a global audience interested in the changing dynamics of a fast-growing Asian economy, so we subtitled the video in English for you:
 

We also recently completed a study, in collaboration with Ipsos, of over 1,000 South Korean smartphone users and found some of the following stats to be interesting:

• 100% of South Koreans have a mobile phone, 27% of them smartphones. This smartphone penetration is higher than countries such as Germany, Italy, Taiwan and Russia, and comparable to the U.S., France, and the UK.


• 85% of smartphone users report that this is their first smartphone, one of the highest proportions of any country in the world that we studied.


• South Korean smartphone users report an average of 42 apps downloaded on their phone, the second highest # of any country for which we currently have results.


• 72% are using search on their smartphones on a daily basis, one of the top 3 countries out of the 30 we studied.


• Koreans are more likely to say they’ve used their smartphone at home (98%) than on the go (90%) or at work (79%) showing that the smartphone is a primary, not just supplementary, gateway to the internet.

We’ll be making many more statistics on Korean smartphone users publicly available for your own analysis within the next few weeks - including mobile search, video, social networking, mobile advertising attitudes and more - so stay tuned.

Ryan Hayward, Product Marketing Manager, Google Asia-Pacific

Voice of the Smartphone User: South Korea
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