By Yoon Sung-won
KT began its commerce-focused mobile video platform service dovido, targeting the global market, Tuesday.
Starting by concentrating on providing beauty-related commercial content to the Chinese market, the company said it seeks to generate more than 70 billion won in sales by 2020.
“Our main competitor will be YouTube, which does not seek to emphasize its presence on mobile platforms. This is like Instagram targeting Facebook’s weak points,” said Kang Min-ho, vice president of KT’s Platform Service Business Unit, during a press conference in Seoul. “Our goal is to record 73.8 billion won ($65.98 million) in net sales by 2020 and build a marketplace with a 1 trillion won trade volume by 2020.”
Kim Hoon-bae, senior vice president of the Platform Service Business Unit, said, “Everything we are working on is about global markets. We are working to include our mobile payment service CLiP and cartoon content, and are in discussions with global telecom companies in the content sector such as China Mobile and NTT DoCoMo.”
According to KT, the dovido service combines video content, online-to-offline (O2O) services and social networking service (SNS). Earlier in June, the company rolled out an O2O platform service named 100C specifically targeting the Chinese market.
With the new mobile video content service, users can easily produce, edit and upload video content like they used to do in computer-based work environments, and connect them to related businesses, which will be available starting next month.
“Whereas YouTube and Facebook share only advertising profits with content creators, we additionally provide three to five percent of product sales profits to them,” Kim said.
Kang said dovido aims to provide an open marketplace. In this space, content creators can introduce diverse beauty-related products to sell them globally. In the process, KT shares the profits generated from sales and advertising with the content providers. Once the beauty-related content secures a position in the market, KT plans to expand the items to the cooking and living items sectors and reach out to North America and Europe, attracting around 200 million users in the long term.
The service is accessible through an application downloadable on Google Play. The iOS version is scheduled to be launched early next month, the company said.