By Yoon Ja-young
SK Planet, the mobile platform unit of SK Telecom, the country’s largest wireless carrier, is aiming for 3.5 trillion won in sales by 2016, when its market value will exceed 5 trillion won. Much of the growth will come from business in overseas markets, according to the company’s chief executive officer, who has displayed an appetite for merger and acquisition (M&A) opportunities.
“SK Telecom has been involved in the media conversion business for around 10 years. SK Planet will rely on this decade of experience and know-how,” Seo Jin-woo, SK Planet CEO, told journalists Tuesday.
SK Telecom launched SK Planet on Oct. 1 as its subsidiary committed to its mobile platform business. The new company manages T Store, an online market place for smartphone applications, T Map, a location-based navigation service, Hoppin, a location-based social media platform, 11th Street, an online auction and shopping site, and Imagine, a retail network for technology products and services.
“This sector is very young. Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo, none of them have continued to be the absolute power for longer than 10 years … Only those continually seeking change and innovation can survive in this industry,” Seo said.
The CEO went on to say that SK Planet is aiming at becoming the top platform company in Asia in five years. T Store is currently the top local app store, with 9.6 million users nationwide and 190,000 registered items. It has 45 million downloads a month on average, and 8.6 billion won in monthly transactions.
The CEO is looking to the worldwide market: “We succeeded in the Korean market, but it was in a walled garden. SK Planet is the new challenge toward the global market.” T Store is scheduled to move into the Japanese market this year, following a partnership with China Mobile, Lenovo and Gree of Japan.
“It is difficult for telecommunications businesses to advance overseas, but there are huge opportunities for platform businesses. We will focus on the Asian market first next year,” Seo said, adding that T Store wants to become the top independent app store in Northeast Asia. SK Planet hopes T Store will be global market place where developers can sell their content to local users and local developers can sell content to global users. “We want it to position it as the premium Android market, where consumers can always find quality applications.”
In its globalization scheme, the company will actively seek M&A. “When you advance abroad, you need a lot of sourcing…We will continue M&A efforts,” Seo said. SK Planet has 500 billion won in cash, but it can get additional funding from SK Telecom for good M&A deals. In the local market Seo said it won’t seek M&A only to increase its customer base.
In the case of T Map, SK Planet plans to open it to subscribers of other mobile carriers.
Seo said decisions will be made based on a long-term perspective. “We won’t look at the profitability index for five years…The new criterion would be how much our services are loved by consumers.”