Korea's digital industry recorded revenue of 1,378 trillion won in 2024, up 9.3% from a year earlier, according to a government survey. Companies are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI), spreading the technology across industries.
The Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) and the Korea Information Society Development Institute released the results of the "2025 Digital Industry Survey" on Thursday. The survey covered 10,323 businesses nationwide over four months from September to December last year.
According to the results, digital industry revenue totaled 1,378 trillion won in 2024, accounting for 15.2% of total industry revenue of 9,038 trillion won. The figure represents an increase of 117.2 trillion won, or 9.3%, from a year earlier, exceeding half — 53.1% — of the manufacturing sector's total revenue of 2,598 trillion won.
By sector, digital-based industries recorded the highest revenue among the four industry categories at 615.8 trillion won, up 15.6% from a year earlier. The growth is attributed to expanded global AI investment and rising exports of existing information and communication technology (ICT) such as semiconductors.
Revenue from digital platform provider industries grew 15.2% to 152.4 trillion won. Sales rose on the back of the spread of AI and digitalization, with platform activity most active in e-commerce platform services (29.0%), portal services (23.3%), and video, audio and information content provision services (22.4%).
The digital brokerage platform user industry rose 14.3% to 214.1 trillion won. This category includes sectors that use digital brokerage platforms, such as wholesale and retail, lodging, and restaurants, with 91.9% of user companies simultaneously using two or more platforms. In the lodging and restaurant sector, kiosk ordering (28.9%) and payment (26.2%) spread, but robot serving and reception remained at just 0.4%, indicating that on-site automation is still in its early stages.
Digital-related industries fell 3.1% from a year earlier to 396.1 trillion won. The decline is attributed to digital retailers based on their own internet shopping malls pursuing diversification of sales channels by joining digital brokerage platforms.
Meanwhile, digital maturity — which refers to the level of an organization's use of digital technology and innovation — reached 75.4%, up 10.8 percentage points from 64.6% a year earlier. By stage, 67.7% were in the digitalization entry and settlement stage, while 7.7% were in the digital transformation entry and settlement stage.
Looking at the development and adoption of digital technologies over the past three years, companies were developing in-house or adopting externally, in order, cloud computing (52.0%), AI (43.5%), and big data (29.1%). The proportion of companies applying AI technology to decision-making and business activities also rose to 24.9% from 15.5% a year earlier.
"The fact that digital industry revenue continues to grow by more than 100 trillion won every year shows that digital transformation is actively spreading across our industries," said Lee Do-gyu, head of the Information and Communication Policy Office at MSIT. "This trend is expected to accelerate further with the AI transition."
