Migrants become new opportunity in Korea’s telecommunication market

Kang Aleisha explains smartphone products to a customer at a LG Uplus store in Asan, South Chungcheong Province, on August 29. Courtesy of LG Uplus

“Zdrasbuice, chem magu bam pamochi (Hello, how can I help you?)?” I could not understand a word of the telephone conversation about opening mobile phone service because it was in Russian.

In Onyang Oncheon Market, a downtown shopping district in Asan, South Chungcheong Province, there is a store that is the No. 1 LG Uplus store in sales in the province, and there is a “sales king” who never misses the top of the sales list. She is Kang Aleisha (31), a fourth-generation Russian Korean from Vladivostok, Russia.

When asked about her sales know-how, Kang shyly said, “I just work hard and... my coworkers help me a lot.”

Team leader Kim Soo-jong, who was next to her, added. “She's a 'role model' for the migrant community. There are nine foreigners who have come to work at the store after seeing how she has established herself.”

More than 2.6 million foreigners living in Korea are emerging as a "new opportunity" in the saturated telecommunications market. Unlike Korean customers, who are taken and taken away, foreigners are literally new customers.

There are several residential areas for migrants in Korea’s industrial complexes. Asan, where large-scale industrial complexes have been built around the workplaces of Samsung Electronics, Samsung Display, and Hyundai Motor, is one of them, with many migrants from Russia and Central Asia.The store where Kang works has a fifty-fifty ratio of domestic and foreign customers.

Kang, a graduate of Moscow University moving to Korea in 2015, noticed Russian customers at a LG Uplus store when she stopped by to open mobile phone service. It has been eight years since she started working as an interpreter at the store. "Young foreigners prefer iPhone or Galaxy flagship smartphones while older foreigners use mid- to low-priced phones. Unlike Koreans, foreigners want to subscribe to an Internet TV service because they can use Russian OTT (Over-The-Top) service with Internet TV."

Some migrants pay agencies to do banking and use hospital services, but Kang gladly helped them to do such various trivial works. Kang's contribution to sales at the store, which has eight employees, is said to be 40 percent.

Hong Shin-seok (42), who runs an LG Uplus store in the region, said, "We couldn't dare to have a foreign employee, but we increased hiring of foreigners after Kang showed great performance."

According to the data released by the Ministry of Justice, there were 2.62 million foreigners living in Korea as of July, more than 5 percent of the country’s total population.

Telecom companies are reflecting these changes in their businesses. “The declining population is a crisis for the telecommunications market, but there are still opportunities in the market for foreigners,” said Hwang Hyun-sik, president of LG Uplus, at an executive workshop in July.

SK Telecom introduced “TransTalker,” an artificial intelligence (AI) interpretation solution that supports 13 languages, at Lotte Department Store in Jamsil, Seoul.

KT has added Mongolian and Russian to its Genie TV multilingual subtitling service, bringing the number of languages available to 12, and other telecom companies are also launching several services for foreigners.

Last month, LG Uplus launched “prepaid internet” that can be used for six to 12 months without a long-term contract, which is aimed at foreigners staying for a short time. An official from LG Uplus said, "We plan to introduce services and products optimized for the needs of foreigners by using foreign counseling services as a market research and customer communication channel."

※This article has undergone review by a professional translator after being translated by an AI translation tool.