The impacts of USIM adoption

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of USIM adoption in the Korean mobile device industry, which has experienced a ‘walled garden’ under a close relationship between device makers and service providers. If USIM is adopted and unlocked in Korea, there will be significant changes in mobile de-vice distribution, as network and device distributions may become separated. In addition, opportunities for creating value-added convergence services will increase with USIM adoption. Through a conjoint analysis of Korean customers, this paper empirically confirms that there will be an impact in the traditional Korean mobile value chain after USIM adoption. Considering these results, this pa-per also suggests strategic clues for various market players.