South Korea SaaS Market Size and Forecast by Offering, Deployment Model, Organization Size, Subscription Model, and End User Industry: 2019-2033

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Industry Assessment Overview

Industry Findings: Strict algorithmic governance and reinforced personal-data enforcement have become structural procurement filters across South Korea. The Enforcement Decree and related application rules for the Personal Information Protection Act were clarified in Mar-2024, strengthening expectations for auditable processing, automated data-subject workflows, and demonstrable model-risk controls when suppliers deploy analytics or recommendation engines. That regulatory posture prompted solution architects to adopt regionally partitioned data stores and consent-aware pipelines, while procurement teams added explicit algorithmic-transparency checkpoints to RFPs. The commercial consequence: shortlists now prioritise vendors who publish clear governance mappings, provide runtime explainability primitives, and supply integration patterns that limit algorithmic drift; these features materially reduce legal and operational exposure for public and regulated commercial deployments.

Industry Player Insights: South Korea’s market transformation is influenced by Naver, Kakao, Samsung SDS, and KT etc. Our assessment finds local platform and cloud providers accelerated Korea-specific AI and sovereign-cloud capabilities to capture regulated workloads. Kakao declared an AI-native group strategy and unveiled the Kanana conversational agent in Oct-2024, signalling an enterprise push for contextual assistants tailored to Korean language and compliance norms; that program raised buyer expectations for localized conversational UX with governance controls. Naver Cloud introduced Korean-focused HyperClova model releases in Apr-2025 and expanded streaming and real-time media features in Feb-2024, which encouraged enterprises to favour vendors offering native Korean-language model capabilities and low-latency data pipelines; buyers reacted by prioritising providers that combine local model stacks with certified hosting and integration services. Samsung SDS and KT broadened managed cloud and private-network offerings through 2024, which reinforced demand for telco–cloud co-delivery in regulated sectors.