South Korea is one of the world’s most wired countries where close to 90 percent of the population owns a smartphone, with a large number of them made by the country’s tech giant Samsung Electronics.

As Samsung’s devices run on Google’s Android operating system, the open source software has undoubtedly had a significant impact on Korea’s digital economy. The question is -- exactly how much economic value has it really generated for local businesses and users?

Google Korea has sought to answer this question by commissioning an inaugural report that aims to objectively quantify the economic impact that the Android ecosystem has had on Korea since its introduction 10 years ago.


The report released Tuesday was compiled by Singapore-based business consulting firm AlphaBeta for Google using publicly available industry data, consumer surveys and interviews. Google did not supply any propriety data for this report to ensure transparency.

From a business perspective, the free and open source nature of the Android OS lets mobile app developers cut down the time it takes to develop a new app by 30 percent, which could mean savings of around 15 million to $75 million in development costs for more than 6,000 Korean apps, the report said.

Developing an app based on the Android OS also grants direct access to a market of more than 1 billion users worldwide who are using Android devices, it added.

In addition, Korea’s two smart device manufacturers, presumably Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, save 1 million development days by developing their software on Android, instead of having to develop their own operating systems from scratch, the report said.

An increase in the number of Android-based smart devices has led to increased data traffic for local telecommunications companies as well, contributing to a 60 percent jump in data traffic from 2011 to 2015, the report said.


In terms of consumer benefits, Korean consumers reportedly received more than $4 billion in self-assessed benefits from using Android-based smart devices.

According to AlphaBeta, there are some 30 million Android users in Korea. The firm extracted a random sample of 400 from this population and surveyed them on how much they valued their Android OS to arrive at the estimate. 

Following a series of questions, such as “what are your favorite features on your smartphone?” and “what do you like about using the Android OS?” the respondents were asked how much compensation they would need if they were prohibited from accessing such features, according to Konstantin Matthies, the report’s head author at AlphaBeta, who presented the findings in Seoul on Tuesday.

In terms of societal impact, the report estimated that Android supported over 40,000 direct app development jobs as well as more than 85,000 indirect and spillover jobs in 2015.

It also claimed that since 2010, the Google-led OS potentially led to over 30 million more Korean subscribers adopting smartphones than would have occurred otherwise, suggesting it may have supported around $15 billion of incremental gross domestic product growth in Korea over the past five years.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)