KT Takes 53K Advance Orders For South Korean iPhone

10:32 am, November 27th, 2009, Ed Sutherland

KT begins selling iPhones Saturday, Nov. 28 (credit: Jinho.Jung/Flickr)

KT begins selling iPhones Saturday, Nov. 27 (credit: Jinho.Jung/Flickr)

The iPhone is not yet selling in South Korea, but already tremors are being felt from its upcoming introduction. KT Corp., which will begin selling the smartphone Saturday, says it’s received 53,000 advance orders since Nov. 22. A rival carrier pointed to the iPhone as one of the reasons it will cut in half the price of its Samsung Omnia II smartphone.

Although Samsung and LG have between 80 percent and 90 percent of the 47 million handsets sold in South Korea, the recent approval of iPhone sales by South Korean Communications Commission provides Apple entry into a potentially lucrative market. South Koreans pay the world’s highest prices for cell phones, with Samsung and LG phones sold in the nation costing twice that elsewhere. Almost half of the country’s cell phones owners reportedly buy new handsets every two years.

SK Telecom, the largest South Korean wireless carrier, said the iPhone is “one of the factors” why it will slash the $900 price for the Omnia II to about $300 when people sign up for a two-year plan.

Another threat to the closed circle of South Korean carriers and handset makers by the iPhone is the App Store. Rather than obtaining the phone’s software directly from the carrier or manufacturer, iPhone owners will be able to directly download applications.

A potential insight into how Apple will fare in South Korea is Japan, another technologically-advanced society in love with their gadgets. One Tokyo analyst told the AP in the year the handset has been available through Softbank Corp., the iPhone has 20 percent of the market.

China, another market Apple has long worked to gain entry, is already showing slowing demand, reports say. Hobbled by an existing base of 2 million black market iPhones and government regulations that kept Wi-Fi out of the early models sold by carrier China Unicom, the China venture produced just 5,000 sales of the handset during the first week after the Oct. 30 launch. The slowdown was enough to alleviate a flash memory shortage due to demand from Apple products.

[Via AppleInsider, Digitimes, AP and Wall Street Journal]

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Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.

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