Jack Tong, president of HTC’s North Asia markets, on Friday pledged to beef up commitment on the observation that Korea is a “difficult place” for a foreign brand to succeed mainly due to the competition posed by strong local brands.

“I have to admit it is not easy. The Korean market is the most difficult and challenging market for foreign brands,” Tong said. “It’s difficult for the foreign brands because you have strong local brands and they create a great user experience and they have good marketing skills and enjoy a great relationship with consumers.”

But HTC will not give up, he stressed, saying the phonemaker will benchmark other foreign brands that successfully wooed Korean consumers, such as Apple Inc.

“We analyzed why Apple can succeed in the Korean market and HTC will also be able to create a premium brand,” Tong said. As part of the solution, Tong said HTC will step up its retail services by strengthening its alliances with the nation’s major resellers. Investment and willingness to promote HTC will be other keys to success in Korea, Tong said.

Taiwan-based HTC is a household name abroad, having made a splash on the global smartphone scene after starting out as a second-tier player.

But its presence has been subdued here in the face of stiff competition from Apple and Samsung.

On Friday, HTC chose Korea as the country to touch off the global launch of its latest smartphone, HTC Sensation. SK Telecom will be distributing the phones at a price of 847,000 won starting on May 25.

HTC Sensation targets global consumers, but some of its key features seemed to be tailor-made for Korean users.

For instance, users can purchase or rent movies-on-demand through the “Watch” application and view them on the phone’s 4.3-inch HD display.

Tong said HTC would be collaborating with content-providers to be able to offer more custom-made content to Korean users: “We are investing to provide more contents to include high-definition video, music, local Korean music.”

Inside, the phone runs on the Android 2.3 Gingerbread, Google’s latest version of smartphone operating systems. The display is 540x960 pixels, and the screen is powered by 1.2GHz, dual-core brains, promising to be competition for Samsung’s Galaxy S 2, which announced an upgrade to the 1.2GHz dual-core processor speed.

By Kim Ji-hyun (jemmie@heraldcorp.com)