IPhone pre-sale orders exceed 50,000

KT Corp., which will begin offering Apple Inc.`s iPhones in Korea today, said advance orders for the handsets exceeded 50,000 as of Thursday.

"We are very excited," Yang Hyun-mi, chief strategy officer at Seongnam, Korea-based KT, said today in a Bloomberg Television interview. "If you look at the trend globally, the smart phone is becoming bigger and bigger." Yang declined to give a sales target for the iPhone.



Apple will compete in a market where Samsung Electronics Co., LG Electronics Inc. and Pantech Co. have more than a 90 percent share and more than nine out of 10 people already own a mobile phone. The iPhone may help boost sales of smart phones, which allow users to surf the Web and compose e-mail messages, and increase wireless Internet usage in Korea, Yang Jong In, an analyst at Korea Investment & Securities Co., wrote in a report this week.

KT, Korea`s largest phone and Internet company, is the first operator to sell the iPhone in the country and has been accepting advance reservations since Nov. 22.

Korea is the only country other than Iceland among the 30 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that hasn`t yet introduced the iPhone, which is available in about 80 nations. (Bloomberg)