Labor of Love or for Profit?
Bright IT Mind Adds Brain to Husband’s Firm NHN
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The high-tech industry's royal couple has truly become a tag-team for profit, when NCsoft, the country's largest online publisher, named a former SK Telecom executive as its new chief strategy officer Tuesday.
The 33-year-old Yoon is the wife of company president Kim Taek-jin and had been widely expected to join NCsoft's top leadership since the couple married in November last year.
The couple has a month-old son, and apparently the new mom had been itching to get back to the office.
Yoon will have a critical role in managing and establishing the company's global strategies, the company said.
``There was confidence in the company leadership that Yoon would be the right person to guide our process forward to become a truly international company,'' said an NCsoft executive.
Strengthening its international business will be critical for the future of NCsoft, the kingpin of Korea's online game industry, which is now desperate of new growth out of the saturated local market.
The company is nearing the release of ``Aion,'' a role-playing action game it hopes will repeat the success of its iconic ``Lineage'' series. The success of Aion is crucial for the company with ``Tabula Rasa,'' a 100 billion won collaboration with famed game developer Richard Garriott, looking more and more like a flop.
Since leaving SK Telecom at the end of last year, there was speculation that Yoon would be moving to NCsoft, where she had been serving as an outside director.
Yoon, a former Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) engineer, grabbed national attention when she became the executive vice president of SK Telecom, the country's largest mobile-phone carrier, at the age of 28, which made her the youngest-ever executive of the company.
However, Yoon, who was in charge of SK Telecom's communication intelligence division, was leaving mixed reviews when she resigned from the telecommunications giant last December.
Yoon had pushed a wide range of projects to improve user-interfaces, search services and customized features for mobile handsets. However, her most ambitious products, ``T-Interactive'' and ``1mm,'' were duds.
It remains to be seen whether she will have a better touch with computer games than with phones.
Yoon first met Kim in 2004 when she was named as the outside director of the online game company.
Yoon, who received her Ph.D from Massachusetts Institute of Technoloy (MIT) at the age of 24, was also the inspiration behind the popular television series, ``KAIST,'' which starred actress Lee Na-young an engineering prodigy.
Before entering SK Telecom, she worked at WiderThan.com, a mobile entertainment services and solutions provider, and at McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm.