98% of Middle-Aged and Older Adults Own Smartphones... Rapid Increase in E-commerce Usage

Frequently Used Apps Include Instant Messengers and Portals

[Asia Economy Reporter Jin-gyu Lee] It has been revealed that 98% of middle-aged people in their 40s and 50s own smartphones, and the use of e-commerce has significantly increased.

According to the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI) on the 3rd, the 2019 Korea Media Panel Survey conducted on 4,583 households and 10,864 individuals in Korea showed that the smartphone ownership rate among middle-aged people in their 40s and 50s was 98.3%.

The smartphone ownership rates for those in their 40s (98.6%) and 50s (98%) were similar to those in their 30s (99.9%) and 20s (99.8%), and about 10 percentage points higher than those in their teens (89.7%) or 60s (84.3%).

The smartphone ownership rate among middle-aged people was 88.5% in 2015, which means it increased by about 10 percentage points in four years. The ownership rate for those in their 50s rose from 81% in 2015 to 98% in 2019, an increase of 17 percentage points.

The mobile applications frequently used by middle-aged people were instant messengers (38.1%), portals (21.7%), news (6.9%), navigation and traffic information (6.2%), games (4.4%), and shopping (4.1%) in that order. Compared to other age groups, the usage rates of game and video apps were somewhat lower, while the usage rates of news and navigation/traffic information were higher.

In particular, the proportion of middle-aged people using e-commerce on smartphones has greatly increased. The e-commerce usage rate among middle-aged people rose from 55.8% in 2016 to 74.9% last year. This was even higher than the overall e-commerce usage rate of all age groups (63.8%). The proportion of middle-aged people using credit card apps or mobile simple payment also increased from 11.5% in 2016 to 19.4% in 2019.

The number of middle-aged people reading newspaper articles on smartphones also surged. Among middle-aged respondents who said they read newspapers, the proportion who read newspapers via apps increased by 26.8 percentage points from 44.4% in 2016 to 71.2% in 2019. The proportion reading paper newspapers was only 2.6% for those in their 40s and 9% for those in their 50s.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.