Add South Korea to the long list of countries where the iPhone is available, now that the South Korean government has approved the sale of the Apple mobile platform in that country.

Even though a technically advanced country like South Korea is a perfect environment for the iPhone, it has never been officially on sale there. Instead, the Korea Communications Commission has used a variety of technical rules to avoid competition with local companies. In place of a free marketplace, the government allowed Korean companies like Samsung and LG to control the South Korean mobile environment, according to a CNET story.

Approximately 93 percent of South Korea’s people subscribe to a mobile telephone service.  This is the kind of market where smartphones thrive, if only because of available applications. This is the strong point that the now-approved iPhone will bering to the Korean mobile marketplace. After all, Apple can offer users 75,000 apps, 1.8 billion of which have been downloaded thus far around the world. A marketplace as sophisticated as that in South Korea will eat up the iPhone and the variety offered by the Apple App store.

The approval for the iPhone has been held up by the South Korean Communications Commission  on what could be seen as a technicality. The South Koreans have now simply lifted a legal bar on operation of location-based services by Apple. The government decided to allow Apple to operate the services itself in a “flexible” application of local law, according to a Commission spokesman. Without that clearance, Apple would have needed a local operator to run the location services and manage user privacy for the data gathered, which would have been highly problematic and costly for Apple.

Although the South Korean market is not nearly as large as the recently opened Chinese market, it is still an important Asian situation in which Apple is now being allowed to operate for the first time. All of the news for Apple in Asia is coming up roses lately, starting with the $1.5 billion deal with China Unicom and then the number one placement in the Wall Street Journal Asia 200 survey. Overall, the Asian technology marketplace is the largest in the world, and Apple’s newfound ability to sell there bodes well for the company in general.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 2:34 pm under International, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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