SK Telecom announced revenue of KRW 4.234 trillion (+0.1 percent), operating income of KRW 410.5 billion (+2.1 percent), net income of KRW 583.5 billion (+2 percent) and EBITDA of KRW 1.203 trillion (+4.5 percent) in the first quarter of 2017.
The marginal growth in SK Telecom’s first quarter revenue was supported by the growth of LTE subscribers and mobile data usage, as well as improved performance of its subsidiaries.
SK Telecom faced challenges including a number of subscribers who choose contract-based mobile fee discounts, elimination of sign-up fees, and reduction of interconnection fees.
The number of SK Telecom’s LTE subscribers reached 21.65 million (+10.9 percent), taking up 72.6 percent of the company’s total mobile subscriber base of 29.83 million.
SK Telecom also achieved results in the new business areas. The sales of SK Telecom’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform NUGU increased in the first quarter. The company has recently added more features to NUGU to enable users to order products from 11st and receive alerts for professional baseball games.
The number of SK Broadband’s IPTV subscribers grew 12.2 percent to 4.07 million and the IPTV revenue increased 21.7 percent to KRW 235.6 billion.
“SK Telecom has sustained steady performance in the mobile network operations business and achieved improved results compared to the same period last year backed by improved profitability of its subsidiaries,” said Ryu Young-sang, CFO of SK Telecom.
