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| Ryu Young-sang, right, CEO of SK Telecom, poses with Jonathan Abrahamson, left, head of product management for digital at Deutsche Telekom, Khalifa Al Shamsi, second from left, CEO of e& life, and Anna Yip, deputy CEO of Singtel during a Global Telco AI Alliance CEO Summit meeting at the Grand Walkerhill Seoul hotel, July 27. Courtesy of SK Telecom |
By Baek Byung-yeul
SK Telecom is rapidly diversifying its business portfolio from telecommunications to AI, data centers and cloud computing as sales of its data center and cloud businesses have seen significant growth in the second quarter, the leading mobile carrier said Tuesday.
The company added it is also increasing its leadership in emerging businesses such as metaverse and urban air mobility (UAM) by increasing the number of service users and investing more in global leading aircraft maker Joby Aviation to improve its future capabilities.
In its second-quarter earnings announcement, SK Telecom said it generated 4.3064 trillion won ($3.27 billion) in sales and an operating profit of 463.4 billion won, up 0.4 percent and 0.8 percent from a year ago, respectively.
While the performance was not up significantly from the same period last year, the company said data center sales were up more than 30 percent year-on-year, and cloud business sales in particular were up more than 60 percent year-on-year.
One of SK Telecom's key diversification initiatives is to become an AI company. Kim Jin-won, chief financial officer of SK Telecom, said the company "will do its best to leap to becoming an AI company leading to maximizing corporate value."
On July 27, SK Telecom launched the Global Telcom AI Alliance with global mobile carriers including Deutsche Telekom, e& and Singtel. The alliance will combine the core AI capabilities of each company to jointly develop a telco AI platform that will play a pivotal role in planning new AI services.
SK Telecom already has its own AI assistant service, A. ― pronounced as "A dot" ―, and in June, it added Chat T, which utilizes the ChatGPT model of the Microsoft Azure Open AI service, to A. to provide a service that enriches users with information as if they were having a conversation with experts with specialized knowledge.
"Based on our solid performance, SK Telecom will continue to build on our cooperation and self-development to secure leadership in the global AI business and become an AI company," the CFO said.
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