SK Telecom said on Wednesday that it posted 537.6 billion won in operating profit in the first quarter of this year on a consolidated basis. The report card is down 5.25 percent from the same period last year. Sales in the first quarter of this year were 4.3923 trillion won, down 1.38 percent from the same period last year.
SK Telecom’s office building. / News 1
Analysts say that the decline in operating profit is due to the still-crazy impact of losing about 700,000 subscribers to other carriers due to hacking accidents last year. SK Telecom released a large amount of subsidies to the mobile communication market when KT’s penalty exemption was implemented in December last year, but has yet to fully recover its subscribers who were deprived.
Separately, SK Telecom recorded a net increase of 210,000 mobile phone subscribers in the first quarter of this year. Mobile phone sales rose 1.7 percent year-on-year. SK Broadband, which is in charge of fixed-line businesses, saw its sales and operating profit increase by 3.2 percent and 21.4 percent year-on-year, respectively, on the back of high-speed Internet growth.
The artificial intelligence (AI) business is cruising. In the case of the AI data center (DC) business, which is a representative growth engine, it recorded 131.4 billion won in sales in the first quarter, rapidly growing 89.3 percent year-on-year. The utilization rate of AI DC, including Gasan, has increased, and sales of GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS, GPU-as-a-service) have increased.
SK Telecom plans to continue to expand its infrastructure base by strengthening its business competitiveness across all areas of the AI DC value chain as demand for AI infrastructure increases rapidly, centering on global big tech.
SK Telecom will also expand its presence in the AI B2B market. Based on its capabilities as Korea’s only full-stack operator covering AI infrastructure, models and services, and its experience in the enterprise business, SK Telecom plans to target the AI B2B market in earnest. To this end, the company has recently established an organization that promotes integration of enterprises directly under its CEO.
In the case of AI B2C, it plans to enhance its fundamental competitiveness by creating synergy between the AI agent business and the communication industry. In particular, the representative AI service ‘Aidat’ plans to improve performance by linking its own AI foundation model at the global model level to strengthen its competitiveness.
Park Jong-seok, Chief Financial Officer of SK Telecom, said, “The first quarter was a meaningful period of actual performance in line with this year’s goal of strengthening fundamental competitiveness based on customer value and restoring profitability through refined AI businesses.”
댓글
0