Ki Ho Park/Kistone
Kim Shin Bae
SK Telecom
In a country where virtually everyone age 15 and over already has a cell phone, it’s not easy for a mobile-phone company to keep growing. But since Kim Shin Bae became the head of South Korea’s largest mobile-phone carrier in March of 2004, SK Telecom has ventured into new businesses that are now fueling double-digit gains in nonvoice traffic and revenues. In 2005’s third quarter, data traffic was 27.6% of mobile-phone revenues, up from 15.5% in 2003.
To arrive at such growth, Kim, 51, opened an online music shop that has 500,000 paid subscribers, set up an affiliate that uses SK’s satellite to beam TV programs to the tiny screens of 300,000 of its subscribers, and activated a wireless Internet portal. The portal will offer multimedia services such as video-on-demand, online games, and news feeds. Next year, sk’s network will be upgraded to a far faster speed, which should allow more video, games, graphics, and other content to flow across its system. The company is also expanding its reach overseas, in part through a $440 million joint venture with EarthLink that is poised to launch commercial service in the U.S. In 2006 a subsidiary will expand service from three of Vietnam’s cities to all of them.