SK Telecom will increase its investment in big data-related platforms to diversify its revenue streams in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), the Korea Times reported.
The carrier is making IoT a priority to offset growing investor concerns about the company’s sustainability amid saturation in the South Korean market.
While SK Telecom has been a strong player with its market share slightly exceeding over 50%, its corporate sustainability is being questioned as the company still heavily relies on traditional telecom services as a revenue scheme.
Korea Timesquoted a company official as saying that SK Telecom will invest more in IoT-, big data- and healthcare-related business solutions this year as we believe those areas have huge growth potential and could benefit us in sync with our leadership in the local telecommunications sector.
The compute power and analytic software now exist to analyze unimaginably huge amounts of data, on a scale that would have been previously impossible.
For example, the SK Group's telecom affiliate plans to hold more competitions, dubbed "Big Data Analytic Festivals," to help local application developers boost their ability to supply more content that will run on within SK's big data systems.
Additionally, the carrier has been teaming up with major platform providers to hedge its risk on investment for new businesses that haven't been existed before.