SK Telecom has reported revenue of KRW 4.372 trillion (+2.2 percent), operating income of KRW 494.8 billion (+14.4 percent), and net income of KRW 302.5 billion (+37.3 percent) for the first quarter of 2023.

ARPU of SK Telecom increased 1 percent to KRW 30.101.

The number of SKT’s 5G subscribers stood at 14.15 million, accounting for more than 60 percent of its total subscribers.

The number of SKT’s 4G / LTE subscribers stood at 15.75 million. The total number of mobile subscribers is 33 million at the end of March 2023.

SK Broadband’s pay TV subscribers and broadband subscribers stood at 9.4 million and 6.76 million, respectively.

Total Capex of SK Telecom decreased 23.7 percent to KRW 212 billion in Q1 2023 from KRW 278 billion in Q1 2022.

Capex of SK Telecom fell 34 percent to KRW 132 billion in Q1 2023.

Capex of SK Broadband dropped 4.7 percent to KRW 78 billion in Q1 2023.
SK Telecom’s revenue of new business areas such as Media and Enterprise grew by 10.2 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively.

SK Broadband’s revenue increased 3.5 percent to KRW 1.062 trillion on the back of higher utilization rate of data centers.

SK Telecom’s Media business revenue increased by more than 10 percent to KRW 393.2 billion.

The revenue of the Enterprise business centered on data center and cloud services increased by 5.8 percent to KRW 386.2 billion. The revenue of data centers and cloud services continued to grow rapidly, up 28.2 percent and 22.3 percent, respectively.

SKT’s subscription service T Universe has 1.8 million monthly active users (MAU) in the first quarter. The company’s metaverse platform ifland, which launched in 49 countries last year, also achieved tangible results by attracting more than 10 percent of MAU from overseas in the first quarter.

SKT will be making efforts to shape into an AI company. By leveraging its capabilities in AI service and technology accumulated over many years, the company is driving innovations in five different areas – Customer & Technology, Time & Space, AI Transformation (AIX) for Industries, Core Business Model, and ESG – with the strategy of AI to Everywhere.

In April 2023, SK Telecom invested KRW 15 billion in Scatter Lab, a start-up known for its Lee Lu-da chatbot. SKT and Scatter Lab will cooperate in diverse AI-related areas, including efforts to evolve A. into a service that can help relieve a person’s loneliness and concerns through close and friendly conversations, and to develop a large language model (LLM) that combines both emotion and knowledge domains.

“We will do our best to ensure that transformation into an AI company will lead to maximization of corporate value and shareholder value,” said Kim Jin-won, CFO of SK Telecom.