In Korea, there are three MNOs; SKT, KT, LGT. They respectively possess 50.67%, 31.42%, and 17.91% of the telecom market (April, 2010) according to KCC (Korea Communications Commission). In this series of feature posts dealing with Korea’s three MNOs, I will provide an overview of SKT, KT, and LGT’s survival strategies in approaching Korea’s highly saturated telecom market, and how they seek to go beyond just providing telecommunication service.

LG Telecom’s Taltongsin initiative, “beyond telecommunication”

LG Telecom’s new growth initiative is called Taltongsin, meaning “Beyond Telecommunications.” This strategy aims to strengthen LGT’s core capability as a Telco and at the same time to increase the market pie by collaborating with other industries where LGT’s communication technologies will be able to offer value. It is different from a market expansion strategy in which LGT will enter into other markets to make profit and end up intensifying the market competition. LGT expects to create a new service genre by applying their ICT to the businesses of corporations and SMEs. LGT hopes to contribute to the welfare of Korean citizens through new services and technologies such as Smart Grid and u-City. Overall, LGT’s Taltongsin hopes to vitalize the ecosystem of the IT industry.

LGT’s survival strategy against SKT and KT

LG Group is Korea’s one of the biggest conglomerates operating their business mainly in electronics, telecom, chemical etc. LG Group used to have three different Telcos in its group, which were LGT, LG Dacom and LG Powercom. LGT is ranks 3rd amongst Korea’s three MNOs. LG Dacom provides local and international telephony services, while LG Powercom provides broadband services. These three Telcos in LG group were merged into one entity in January 2010 and began the new era of integrated LGT.

This month, integrated LGT changed its corporate name into LG U+. “U” means creating a new world where customers can enjoy communication technologies and services ubiquitously. “+” means offering more than the traditional telecom services to customers through its enhanced ubiquitous technology. Such a change in name also reveals LGT’s strong intention to stretch their customer base further onto enterprises such as ICT solution providers.

Korea’s telecommunication market, which had been segmented into fixed and mobile, was integrated into one in 2009. For example, KT acquired its mobile arm KTF. SKT acquired Hanaro Telecom and founded SK Broadband. LGT’s merge with LG Dacom and LG Powercom was just another follow up strategy against its bigger competitors. (LGT, as the smallest player, had always followed the market rules set by its bigger competitors.) Since last year, the B2B sector has risen as a new target market among the bigger Telcos, and thus LGT had to respond accordingly to this market change. External market environment, such as the saturated B2C market, was another factor that urged this B2B initiative, as in the other two Telco’s cases as well.

How LGT plans to carry out its Taltongsin initiative

Mr. Lee Sang-Chul, a former minister of Korea’s Ministry of Information Communications, was appointed as new CEO of the integrated LGT in January 2010. His first initiative had been “Taltongsin.” However, it has been moving on rather slowly for the last five months.

In May 2010, LGT announced its plan to raise Taltongsin funds which amounts to 15 billion KRW per year. This fund will let LGT invest in new technologies and acquire companies with high potential. Based on this, LGT will be able to maximize synergy in Taltongsin business areas. The main areas of interests include media, advertising, education, utility, healthcare, and etc.

LGT will select the target to invest in but the operation will be trusted to VC or LG Future Fund – LG group’s R&D fund. To do so, LGT established a dedicated team for this work and made an investment committee in the strategy group. They are in charge of the investment appraisal, execution and management.

What are the prospects for LGT’s Taltongsin initiative?

There are three phases in developing a B2B business; preparing, piloting, and penetrating. I believe LGT is still in the preparation stage while KT and SKT have moved further on to the penetrating and piloting stages. As described in the above, LGT’s Taltongsin initiative is yet to be fully developed. There are neither apparent trials nor achievements other than its funds.

However, the market’s expectation towards LGT’s Taltongsin initiative is quite high. LGT, as the smallest player, has often come up with very clever strategies for its survival. The company is talented at designing unique values that target specific segments of customers. With such strategies, LGT has always managed to go beyond the market order. Some examples of the company’s successful strategies include an FMS (Fixed-Mobile Substitute) service called Givun Zone, which was a strategy against KT’s fixed voice, a full browsing service with a very cheap price plan that made an impact on Korea’s mobile data services. Likewise, industry experts are expecting another surprise from LGT with its new Taltongsin strategy.

In Korea, there are three MNOs; SKT, KT, LGT. They respectively possess 50.67%, 31.42%, and 17.91% of the telecom market (April, 2010) according to KCC (Korea Communications Commission). In this series of feature posts dealing with Korea’s three MNOs, I will provide an overview of SKT, KT, and LGT’s survival strategies in approaching Korea’s highly saturated telecom market, and how they seek to go beyond just providing telecommunication service.

SK Telecom’s IPE Initiative

“SKT’s breakthrough strategy for highly saturated telecom market is IPE (Industrial Productivity Enhancement). We hope to be a ‘Global ICT Leader” by achieving 20 Trillion KRW of IPE sales by 2020, at least 50% of which will be from global business” said Mr. Chung Man-Won, the CEO of SKT, at a Press Conference in Oct. 2009

As the name itself suggests, SKT’s brand-new IPE strategy aims to enhance the productivity of companies in other industries by utilizing SKT’s advanced ICT solutions. SKT’s new growth strategy IPE is crossing its telecom market boundaries. Yet, this does not necessarily mean that SKT will actually penetrate into other markets and compete with their incumbent players. Instead, SKT will enter into other markets and help incumbent players to run their business better. It is totally different dimension of initiative from SKT’s former convergence strategy that aimed at providing services such as mobile TV, mobile banking and mobile music.

Since the inauguration of Mr. Chung Man-Won in January 2009, he has been fully committed to pursuing IPE.

IPE – SKT’s survival strategy

IPE is SKT’s B2B market strategy targeting various enterprise customers in Korea. SKT is Korea’s oldest and largest MNO with more than half of the market share. SKT is a major subsidiary of the SK group, one of the biggest conglomerates in Korea (such as Samsung, LG, etc). By acquiring Hanaro Telecom, Korea’s once 2nd ranked broadband player, in January 2008, SKT became Korea’s leading integrated fixed/mobile network operator.

In the strategic context of IPE, SKT serves customers from various enterprises. IPE’s core target sectors include Retail, Logistics, Financial, Education, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Construction and SME. SKT is cooperating with POSCO(Steel Manufacturing), Chungdam Learning (English Education), Dongbu Group (Finance, Construction, Logistics, etc) and so on.

SKT is a highly profitable company with a 34.8% EBITA margin as of 2009. SKT also leads Korea’s wireless market with more than half of its market share. SKT’s ARPU has also reached 42,698 KRW as of 2009 4Q, which is approximately 37% higher than its follow up competitor, KT. However, SKT needs to grow continuously and it is difficult to achieve such a target by simply repeating their past strategies for the following reasons. First of all, Korea’s wireless market as a whole is highly saturated since the penetration rate already exceeds 100% as of 2009 4Q. In addition, SKT could not increase its market share in wireless due to government regulations. Keeping in mind the fact that SKT has focused only on B2C market so far, SKT opts for B2B market as its next target with its IPE strategy.

Number of subscribers/Penetration Rate

For who?

In December 2009, SKT signed a MoU(Memorandum of Understanding) with Chungdam Learning, Korea’s leader in English education services. SKT aims to provide SLS (Smart Learning Service) by developing a u-Learning Platform, Learning Management System and customized hand devices. Its first output called ‘English Bean’ (www.englishbean.co.kr) was launched in January 2010, which focuses on practicing verbal English through mobile and online study platforms.

In addition, SKT will collaborate with POSCO (Korea’s global leader in steel manufacturing) to construct a Smart Factory. In the next 4 years, current landline phones will be replaced by wireless and the smartphone based ‘Mobile Office’ which includes e-mail, name card, e-signature, schedule, bulletin, etc., enabling workers to work at multiple locations ubiquitously. The smart factory solution is expected to bring positive effects on the overall efficiency in logistics, equipment, safety, and energy savings for POSCO.

The Task Force team for IPE was formed in mid-2009 and executed an in-depth analysis of the market including about 300 interviews with experts from a range of industries. The IPE business group was formed this year to diversify its business models.

What will be the future of IPE strategies by SKT?

A few days ago, SKT signed a MoU with Telkom in Indonesia to establish a JV (Joint Venture) for building DCEH (Digital Contents Exchange Hub). DCEH is the hub for diverse digital contents such as music, game, and video for customers, music contents providers, and network operators. SKT will be in charge of the platform building, service operation, and contents sourcing. Overall, SKT’s IPE in Indonesia will focus on automotive, healthcare, and education.

SKT’s IPE plan aims to grow together with its enterprise customers in other industries by providing them SKT’s advanced ICT solutions. While enterprise customers themselves will benefit from improved productivity, SKT will also acquire great advantages for their global business. As a matter of fact, SKT has barely achieved success in their global business so far. It was mainly due to failure in understanding the local customers. While B2C market customers are more complex and difficult to understand due to cultural and emotional factors, B2B market customers are rather straightforward and their needs are more standardized. In addition, SKT will have greater opportunities to accumulate strong track records by providing their solutions to Korea’s manufacturers, many of who are global leaders in their fields, such as POSCO, Hyundai Motors, and so on.

Once reaching up to 8000 mobile subscribers in one day in Korea, iPhone no doubt still maintains popularity since its late launch here in November 2009. Some of you may not be aware of that there was a round 1 of iPhone versus Androids, perhaps because the earlier attempts to put domestic android phones, such as Motorola ‘Motoroid’ and LGT ‘Android-1’, up against the iPhone in February this year had been somewhat futile.

However, since SKT’s launched its three (more competitive) Android phones in April, there has been a huge come back for Androids, expanding its smartphone market share by six fold up to 35.3% in Korea. In fact, Android phones have actually surpassed the market share of iPhone in Korea which had been reduced from 43.3% in the first quarter to 31.4%. This shift towards the favor of Androids had gradually began with SKT’s launch of Pantech’s ‘Sirius’ mid April, then Samsung’s ‘Galaxy A’, and in May with HTC’s ‘Desire’.

The Android phones still have several matters to settle in order to continue on its successful launch in Korea throughout the latter half of the year, such as the build-in memory for apps, OS upgrades, and payment issues for the Android Market.

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Furthermore, the round 2 of Android vs. iPhone is getting hot with Samsung’s masterpiece ‘Galaxy S’ which held its launching event yesterday, on June 8thin Korea, on the exact same date as the launching of iPhone 4G in the United States.
With the immense upgraded iPhone 4G and Galaxy S launch going eye to eye in Korea, it certainly will not be too easy to determine which one will fully capture the taste of the Korean consumers.

Left: Steve Jobs with iPhone 4G        Right: Samsung’s Galaxy S

Galaxy S has been equipped with a 1 ㎓ processor and the 2.1 version of the Android OS. The data processing speed has been upgraded and it boasts its AMOLED (active matrix organic light-emitting diode) vivid picture display. It is also the thinnest smartphone in the market today with a thickness of 9.9㎜, and has a replaceable battery. No doubt, Galaxy S contains the technology and specifications that could definitely make it possibly one of the world’s best.

The new iPhone 4G, on the other hand, is about one quarter the thickness and approximately two times the picture quality of the iPhone 3GS. It also fully addressed the consumer complaints for the previous iPhone 3GS, by installing a 500-megapixel camera that can capture HD videos and make video calls. It also has many of the iPad features such as an ‘A4′ processor (CPU), 512MB memory, 16 or 32GB capacity, electronic book (eBook) services, and further added multitasking capabilities. These improvements have certainly captured the attention of consumers, and very likely to further the iPhone’s dominance of the global smartphone market.

Galaxy S will be in full release, soon available for Korean consumer around mid-June, while iPhone 4G is scheduled to release in Korea by July – a pleasant surprise as Korea had been 2 years late in getting the first iPhones into Korea. We will simply have to wait and see who will be the ultimate smartphone standing in Korea.