Korea Times – K-pop’s rise is fast and furious, representing the country’s booming cultural industry. Yet this doesn’t mean K-pop is the most profitable export item among cultural products. Guess what the No.1 is? Computer games.
According to the state-run Korea Finance Corporation, Korea’s games exports in 2012, the latest date, reached $2.6 billion, nearly more than half of the country’s cultural products exports. The figure was a whopping 11 times the $235 million in exports of K-pop content that year, the institution said Monday.
By sector, online games using fixed-line Internet were the biggest money-maker with $2.4 billion or 91.4 percent of the total export volume, including mobile games available on smartphones and arcade games. Mobile games came second with $169 million.
The export volume gap between online and mobile games was huge, but analysts say it is narrowing rapidly as more people use smartphones and high-speed mobile Internet links.
“The game industry can be linked with a number of other industries such as movies, animation, characters and design,” said Kim Hee-tae, a researcher at the corporation. “It can create huge added value.”
