Apple Pay is finally making it to South Korea, around eight years after it was initially launched. The arrival of the service in Samsung’s home country has been talked about quite a bit recently, and today Apple confirmed the move in the Korean version of its press release announcing the new yellow iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus models.
The machine translated relevant paragraph sounds like this:
In addition, as Apple is about to launch Apple Pay in South Korea, Korean users will be able to make easy, fast, and secure payments using Apple Pay on their iPhone, including the new iPhone Yellow, and in on-line merchants and apps.
There’s still no exact launch date for Apple Pay, but the service has cleared a very important hurdle last month, when South Korea’s Financial Services Commission confirmed that credit card firms in the country are allowed to offer Apple Pay on condition that they don’t charge consumers or merchants any fees for it.
Perhaps it won’t surprise you to hear that Samsung Pay absolutely dominates the mobile payments space in its home market, achieving around 80% market share. This will now definitely be eaten into by Apple Pay.
iOS 16.4, which is currently in the beta testing phase, has some references to Apple Pay in South Korea, so the service may officially launch in the country once this update gets a general release later this month or in early April.
