2018 ICT Industry Outlook
of Korea
Copyright2018 Korea Information Society Development Institute
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Message from the President
Externally, the global economy has been showing stronger signs of recovery as the stable
recovery of advanced economies and the gentle soft-landing of the Chinese economy are driving
up world trade and production as well as demand for investment worldwide. This has contributed
to the improvement of the export environment for Korea, leading to increases in investments,
mostly in the manufacturing industry that has taken a favorable turn in exports. Besides this,
domestic demand also entered into a slow recovery phase with the resolution of political uncer-
tainty, amid rising expectations for policies to boost domestic demand. As a result of improved
external and internal macroeconomic conditions, the growth rate of the Korean economy
rebounded in 2017.
The Korean ICT sector also rebounded successfully on the strength of an export boom in
major ICT goods, including semiconductors, which was driven by increasing demand for ICT
products. The demand arose from the global economic recovery coupled with the advent of the
Fourth Industrial Revolution. Despite these achievements, however, the long- and mid-term
outlook on the Korean ICT sector is not all that bright: Korea is still vulnerable in terms of com-
petitiveness or scale in the fields that should form the core of future growth in the ICT sector,
such as artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and software. The strategies that have made it possi-
ble to create success stories in the ICT sector are now considered to have started to work as
structural limitations. Hence, in order to help develop ICT-related government policies to ensure
continuous growth in the ICT sector based on a structural understanding of the Korean ICT sec-
tor and the recent environment surrounding the ICT sector, this study aims to provide data on
the sector including the current state and forecasts for the Korean ICT sector as well as its com-
petitiveness.
The purpose of this study is to assess the performance of the Korean ICT sector in 2017
and provide projections on production, exports and subscriptions for each ICT industry in 2018,
taking into account various issues raised within the sector. It also intends to analyze the global
competitiveness of the ICT sector based on major global competitiveness indexes and examine
new growth businesses in order to draw policy implications to be considered in planning future
strategies for the ICT sector.
This report outlines the current state and issues of Korea’s ICT sector in three parts. Part I
describes the trends and outlook for the Korean ICT sector in five categories: communications
services, broadcasting services, information services, communications and broadcasting equip-
ment, and software. Part II provides international comparisons of Korea and other countries in the
ICT sector to find out where Korea’s competitiveness lies and where improvements need to be
made. Lastly, Part III looks into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which has extensive economic
and social ripple effects–a revolution brought about by ICT-based intelligent digital technology
transformation, which is represented by AI and ICBM (IoT, cloud computing, big data, mobile).。