Baek Byung-yeul is a journalist at The Korea Times focused on cultural content, including films and cultural events in South Korea. You can contact him at baekby@koreatimes.co.kr to share your insights.
SK, KT rethink attending MWC amid Omicron variant
Visitors arrive at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) fair in Barcelona, Spain, June 28, 2021. AFP-Yonhap
By Baek Byung-yeul
By Baek Byung-yeul
SK Telecom and KT are agonizing over the size of their participation in the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world's largest mobile communication trade show, due to the increasing spread of the Omicron variant.
Officials from the mobile carriers said Monday that they were set to attend the tech show, but it is still undecided how many employees they will dispatch and whether any C-level executives will attend. Many participants in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held earlier this month in Las Vegas tested positive for COVID-19. And the average number of daily new infections in Spain, the host country of the exhibition, exceeds 100,000.
The MWC will be held in Barcelona, Spain, for four days from Feb. 28 to March 3. The event is one of the largest tech shows in the world along with the CES and the IFA in Germany. In 2020, the event was canceled for the first time due to COVID-19 and it was held online and offline at the end of June 2021, about four months later than usual.
The organizer said it has not changed its plans to hold the event in person as scheduled. They said this year's event will feature over 1,500 exhibitors from around 150 countries. Given the exhibition is a place to show the global trends of the mobile industry, SK Telecom and KT have enjoyed the spotlight among Korean companies taking part in the event. LG Uplus, the other major Korean mobile carrier, said it has not participated in the event since last year when LG Electronics withdrew from the mobile device manufacturing market.
A KT official said the company will establish a promotional booth at the exhibition, but whether its CEO Ku Hyeon-mo will join the event is not decided yet. “It is expected that the company will come out with a more detailed plan after the Lunar New Year holiday,” the official said.
SK Telecom said it is planning to set up a booth, but added it is cautious after people who attended the CES tested positive for the virus. “What we can officially say is that everything related with the event is under consideration. At a time when Omicron cases are increasing in Europe, we are keeping an eye on the changing situation there,” the official said.
An LG Uplus official said the company has no plans to exhibit at MWC this year. “Every year, we send executives and employees to the event to see the changing trends of the industry but it also has not been decided whether to send a spectator group for this year's event.”
Not only local companies but also government officials are pondering whether to risk attending the event. The ICT ministry has attended the annual event to catch up with recent trends in the mobile industry, but it is considering skipping the show this year due to the increasing variant cases.