The Impact of Convergence on Business Performance;An Empirical Study on Korean ICT Sector

The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Determinant factors in this transformation process are deregulations and technological advancements. From the value chain perspective, industry convergence plays the most crucial role in the transformation of the established telecommunications and media industries. The objective of this paper is to validate the impact of convergence on the business performance using empirical data. To identify the various effects driven by industry convergence, we analyzed the relationships between firm's degree of convergence and the business performance using regression analysis. From the empirical result with the 2002-2005 data, it was found that the convergence across ICT sectors improves the business performance measured by Tobin's q significantly and this is only a recent phenomenon. These results are consistent with the conjecture that higher degree of convergence is becoming more associated with higher market value.