South Korea is the 3 rd largest mobile market in Asia after China and Japan . Approximately 81% of the population subscribes mobile phone service and the 95% of the devices provide the ability to access wireless internet and download the mobile contents.

Through fierce competition, only 3 operators have survived in Korean mobile market: SK Telecom, KT Freetel, and LG Telecom.
Total number subscribers for all 3 operators reached to 39.5 millions.
Even though the market growth seems to have come to a saturation point but mobile number portability (MNP) to churn other's subscribers, mobile TV enabled device delivery, and design centric device trend drive the mobile market in turbulent competition.

Mobile Data Service Market
According to MIC quarterly report, 37 million mobile subscribers are carrying CDMA 1X enabled handset which supports mobile contents downloading and streaming. Sales of data service expanded at CAGR 60% during 5 years to 3.18 trillion won (US$ 3.07 billion)

This growth can be accounted by emerging of music service, digital multimedia broadcasting, LBS, and mobile banking service. Especially, revenue from music download service grew as a major portion of data service sales. DMB and mobile banking service did not establish a profitable value chain and business model yet. Thus, most of data service revenue consists of music download and legacy entertainment services.

According to the research by NIDA (National Internet Development Agency), average wireless internet users use data services 4.9 times for 51.5 minutes per week. Male users used it more with 5.5 times compared to the 4.3 times of female users, but the usage time for female users were longer with 54.7 minutes/wk compared to 48.8 minutes/wk of male users.

Mobile Growth Forecast
Mobile phone sales and services in South Korea are expected to reach to 20 trillion won (US$19.8 billion) in 2009 according to ICD research. The increasing revenue in wireless data service sector was expected to compensate the saturated revenue of voice call sector with the average annual growth rate of 6.7% until 2009. Sales of voice call services were expected to expand at an average annual growth rate of 3.4% by 2009 to 14.2 trillion won (US$13.8 billion), compared with 12 trillion won (US$ 11.8 billion) in 2004. Sales of wireless data service including SMS were expected to expand at an average annual growth rate of 18.3% to 6 trillion won (US$5.8 billion) in 2009 from 2.6 trillion won (US$2.5 billion) in 2004.

Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability (WIPI)
Although there were so many trials for providing uniform abstract application execution environment on a device level, contents provider and service provider always experiencing fragmentation issues according to each vendors, devices, or carrier's specific requirement.

From an economic standpoint, those fragmentation issues lead and complexity and redundancy to respond each fragmented layer caused increase in contents deployment cost and the management cost.

In 2002, Ministry of Information and Communication Republic of Korea (MIC), mobile operators, vendors, and contents providers agreed that it is crucial to resolve problems caused by fragmentation and guarantee interoperability between devices and operators for setting up successful contents driving value chain in mobile data service market.

Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability (WIPI) has been developed towards this end by the Korean Wireless Internet Standardization Forum (KWISF) with support from the Korean Telecommunication Technology Association (TTA) and the Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC).

All platforms used by mobile operators in South Korea , including Qualcomm's BREW, must comply with WIPI. South Korea 's three wireless operators ? SK Telecom, KTF, and LG Telecom ? are following the government's requirements.

WIPI is technically based on Sun's Java technology but also supports binary application runtime environment to help mobile phone subscribers send and share mobile applications including games and multimedia content over regardless of operators and devices.

After WIPI platform was mandated as a standard platform to all handset shipments in Korea to support contents download service from April 2005, total sales of WIPI enabled handset expanded to 20 millions units.

WIPI aims to expand its effective coverage to outside Korea , but this will depend on the success of Korean WIPI-based services. As of now, WIPI is adopted in Helio, wireless operator in North America, and is under technical discussion in China for application platform. Similar business cases have been developed by SK Telecom to export its NATE portal platform to APBW of Taiwan, Pelephone of Israel, TA Orange of Thailand , and Nursat of Kazakhstan.