Korean IoT Market
The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning announced on January 19 that the sales of the domestic IoT market are estimated to have increased by approximately 28% from a year ago to 4.8125 trillion won last year. It added that the IoT market of Korea is forecast to reach 5.3 trillion won in size this year, showing a growth rate of at least 10%.
According to the ministry, 45.8% of the sales, approximately 2.2058 trillion won, was recorded in the product and equipment segment. It was followed by the network segment, which took up 30.9% by posting sales of 1.4848 trillion won.
By IoT service type, personalized service such as smart home, healthcare and missing child prevention accounted for 31%. It was followed by payment and settlement (19.5%) like NFC payment and store sales management and social and cultural service (8.5%) for library management, tourist information service, etc.
Last year, a total of 1,212 firms were engaged in IoT business, 551 out of them in the field of IoT service. 319, 174 and 168 of the others were doing business in product and equipment, network, and platform, respectively. Each of 51.4% of the 1,212 companies had 10 to 49 employees while those with one to nine, 50 to 299 and at least 300 each took up 29.6%, 16.6% and 2.4%. The number of IoT engineers in Korea increased by 911 to 22,737 between 2014 and last year and 2,693 is likely to be added to the number this year.