SEOUL: Consumers in South Korea bought more tablets in 2015—but mobile users in the country still have relatively few such devices compared to their neighbors across Asia-Pacific.
According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), tablet shipments in South Korea in 2015 were up substantially over the prior year, rising from just under 1.5 million in 2014 to 2 million.
For a country of about 50 million people, that&rquo;s not many tablets—and other evidence suggests tablets are not very big in South Korea.
According to Adobe, for example, just 2.0% of traffic in South Korea came from tablets in 2014, compared to 34.8% which came from smartphones. Other countries in Asia-Pacific had higher shares of traffic from tablets, including Japan (5.1%), India (4.1%) and Australia and New Zealand (11.1%). In China, 4.6% of web traffic came from tablets that year.
In April 2015, Yahoo and Flurry reported that just 2% of mobile device usage in South Korea came from full-sized tablets, with an additional 1% from small tablets. That compared to 7% and 4%, respectively, in China.
Instead, consumers in South Korea have turned to phablets. The Yahoo/Flurry research found 63% of mobile usage was from phablets—far higher than any other Asia-Pacific country studied. According to Cisco Systems, there were 1 million connected tablets in use in South Korea in 2014. Cisco expected that figure to rise to 3 million by 2019.
