As reported in The New York Times, Apple was overwhelmed with pre-orders for the iPhone 4 and had to close pre-ordering and apologize to customers, asking them to try again when the phone was in stock. What does this say about the emerging market for smart phones in Korea?
Although KT has already sold 700,000 or so of the iPhone 3Gs, they are impossible to find and there is a waiting list for them in the South Korean market. It seems apparent that there would be an equally strong demand here for the iPhone 4, as soon as it becomes available.
The demand for these phones is not because most of their most valuable components (screen, camera, batter, main processing chip, memory chip, etc.) are made in Korea. Instead, it is because Korean consumers have perhaps the world's highest expectations of their telecommunications services of any consumer group in the world. Three decades ago, an average Korean had to wait over a year to have regular telephone service installed and there were no digital networks. Today all of that has changed. Korean consumers expect the very latest and very best technology and are quick to adopt it. I say bring on the iPhone 4 and the Androids!