LG exits the smartphone market

 In a sign of the times, LG has announced that it will stop manufacturing smartphones.   As reported by The Korea Joongang Daily  and also widely covered in the Korean and international media, this move comes after 25 years in the business.  In a statement this week, LG explained that “The dominance of two companies was strengthening in the premium smartphone market, while competition in the affordable price segment was intensifying,” and “LG Electronics failed to actively respond [to such market conditions].” The company's statement also said that the move would “enable the company to focus resources in growth areas such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence and business-to-business solutions, as well as platforms and services.”  

The manufacture and export of smartphones by Korea has been a major theme of this blog over the years, as shown by these search results.   Given the commoditization of smartphones, as mentioned in this post, it was perhaps inevitable that the global competition for their manufacture would pose a major challenge for Korean manufacturers.  In historical perspective, another factor to consider is the "smartphone shock" that affected Korea's ICT sector following the arrival of the i-Phone at the end of 2009-beginning of 2010.

Is Google search finally gaining traction in Korea?

Over the years I've posted frequently on the topic of Internet search engines and Google's failure to penetrate the Korean market, which was dominated by Naver.  (see some of the prior posts here)  Recently, The Korea Joongang Daily published a short article indicating that the long term trend of dominance by Naver began to change sometime after 2016.  The article contained this graphic (click for a full size version) indicating the shift in market share. As noted in the Joongang Daily article, " Google’s presence was negligible at 0.78 percent only five years ago, according to data tracker Internet Trend, but the share shot up to 41 percent this year, the average of the index between Jan.1 and March 10.  At the same time, the share of the homegrown portal shrank from 86 percent in 2016 to 53 percent this year. The change in the share indicates that the gain of Google has primarily come at the expense of Naver.  Both Naver and Google declined to confirm the numbers.  Industry insiders say that people in quest of unpaid query results turned towards Google especially for their research or work-related tasks." The shift reflected in this graphic, based on market share data from Internet Trends, would seem to indicate that something important is happening in the search market here in Korea.  Koreans in large numbers may be finding value in searching the global, multilingual internet, rather than relying only on Naver as a Korean language domestic portal for various types of information.

Measuring Korea's lead in 5G

 There are multiple ways of empirically measuring a nation's progress in building 5G networks.  The latest report from Opensignal, entitled "Benchmarking the Global 5G Experience" provides more detail on South Korea's leadership in the implementation and adoption of 5G networks.   As shown in the graphic (click for a full size version), Korea ranks first in download speed and second in upload speed, among the ten top countries in the study.  The report also gives the nation high ranks on measures of experience (video, games, voice apps) and extent (availability, reach).

South Korea's lead in 5G

South Korea's ICT-driven development took off in the 1980s when the nation modernized and digitized its telephone network.  That is why, in recent publications, I have characterized this nation's approach as "Network-centric digital development."  It appears that this pattern will continue as next generation networks appear.   As shown in the graphic (click for a full size version) GSMA Intelligence predicts that Korea will continue to lead the world in consumer adoption of 5G through 2025.

South Korea leads the world in Bloomberg's Innovation Index

 For the seventh time in the nine years it has been published, South Korea ranked number one in the world on Bloomberg's Innovation Index.  For more detail, see the article here  (Click on the graphic at left for a full size version.) 

As shown in the table below (click on it for a full-size version), the seven criteria that make up the Bloomberg Innovation Index are as follows:   R&D Intensity, Manufacturing Value-Added, Productivity, High Tech Density, Tertiary Efficiency, Researcher Concentration, and Patent Activity.