SK to raise smartphone offerings by 30%
By Kim Yoo-chul
SK Telecom, the nation’s top mobile carrier, said that it plans to increase smartphone offerings for this year by up to 30 percent amid the continued ``smartphone frenzy’’ in Korea.
Upcoming offerings will mostly be the ones that use Google’s Android platform as the main operating system. But SK is set to introduce the smartphone using Samsung Electronics’ own Bada platform, while it has also been in talks with Nokia to launch additional smartphone model based on Symbian OS.
On Thursday, SK Telecom said it will release 10 new smartphone models only in the fourth quarter, bringing its newly-introduced models to 24 throughout this year.
SK released two, nine and three smartphone models in the first quarter, second quarter and third quarter, respectively.
Of them, 18 models are based on Android OS, while the other sixe use either Research In Motion’s BlackBerry OS or Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS, according to the company.
``We may add one or two more as we are in talks with Samsung Electronics and Nokia to introduce Bada and Symbian OS handsets,’’ said a company official.
Cindy Kang, a spokeswoman for SK Telecom, declined to comment for the launching timing for the sets, though a Samsung Electronics spokesman nodded over its plan to launch the Bada smartphone within this year. A representative of Nokia’s South Korean official was not available for comments.
In South Korea, the smartphone market has shown drastic and consistent growth since the arrival of Apple’s iPhone, late last year. Research firms expect the number of smartphone users to go over six million, which is bigger than 4.5 million-estimated PC market and 2.3 million-forecasted digital camera segment.
``Amid the market boom, SK Telecom has revised up the target for subscribers to 3.3 million by the end of 2010 from an earlier projection of 2 million,’’ added the official.
As of the end of October, SK Telecom secured 2.8 million smartphone customers, which account for about 12 percent out of its total 25.5 million clients across the country.
More models will help the carrier increase the profit as uses are paying more to use more wireless data. In the third quarter, SK Telecom saw an increase of its wireless data sales by 16 percent from a year ago, it said in a regulatory filing, recently.
SK Telecom has sought to get much of its revenue from the sale of smartphones as part of its strategy to stay away from the highly-saturated domestic land-line services market.
To meet the explosive demand for wireless data, the carrier earlier said it will start the next-generation mobile network service called the long-term evolution (LTE), from 2011, and increase 50 percent more of its wireless Internet or Wi-Fi zones by the end of this year.