“Last year’s business was good”…Three mobile carriers, annual operating profit exceeded 4 trillion won for 2 consecutive years

Thanks to the expansion of 5G subscribers and the even growth of wired/wireless communication and non-communication sectors last year, the three mobile telecommunication companies SK Telecom, KT, and LG U+ exceeded 4 trillion won in combined annual operating profit last year.

According to the industry on the 9th, on this day, KT announced that it recorded annual sales and operating profit of 25.65 trillion won and 1.6901 trillion won, respectively, in the fourth quarter of 2022. Compared to the same period last year, it increased by 3.0% and 1.1% respectively. Sales exceeded 25 trillion won for the first time since listing in 1998.

SK Telecom’s annual sales and operating profit, which were disclosed on the 8th, increased by 3.3% and 16.2% year-on-year, respectively, to KRW 17.305 trillion and KRW 1.6121 trillion. The rate of increase in operating profit was the highest among the three companies. LG U+ announced on the 3rd that it recorded sales of 13.906 trillion won and operating profit of 1.813 trillion won last year. Sales were similar to the previous year (0.4%↑), but operating profit increased by 10.4%. In particular, LG U+ exceeded 1 trillion won in annual operating profit for the first time.

As a result, the combined operating profit of the three companies last year was 4,383.5 billion won, up 8.56% (345.5 billion won) from the previous year. Following 2021, the combined sales exceeded 4 trillion won for the second consecutive year.

In the industry, the increase in the number of 5G subscribers is cited as the background for the good performance. In particular, as the number of 5G subscribers with more expensive rates than LTE increased, ARPU (average revenue per user) also increased. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, as of December last year, there were 28,059,343 5G subscribers, up 30.1% from the beginning of the year (January). During the same period, the proportion of 5G subscribers of the three companies was 13.39 million for SK Telecom, 8.45 million for KT, and 6.06 million for LG U+.

In addition, as demand for overseas travel increased due to the easing of the spread of Corona 19, roaming sales turned to recovery. An official from the telecommunications industry said, “The contribution of roaming sales in the fourth quarter of last year was more than in the third quarter (more than twice as much as before the corona).” .

New businesses in the non-telecommunications sector also grew steadily. SK Telecom’s data center and cloud-centered enterprise sales increased by 12.5% ​​year-on-year to KRW 1,508.6 billion. SK Telecom plans to actively promote solution businesses such as robots and vision AI (artificial intelligence) this year as well. Language-generating AI, such as ChatGPT, is also applied to artificial intelligence assistant ‘A.’.

KT’s B2B (business-to-business transaction) sales increased by 88.9% compared to the previous year as it won large-scale AICC (AI contact center) construction projects mainly in the financial sector and the growth of ‘Aisen Cloud’, a smart cloud contact center. This year, it will commercialize the super-giant AI ‘belief’ in the first half of the year and expand it to a 200 billion parameter scale model within the year to strengthen AI services at the group level.

LG U+’s corporate infrastructure sales increased by 6.1% year-on-year, and solution business sales also increased by 7.3% year-on-year. LG U+ plans to develop the smart factory into a business that continues to grow at an average annual rate of more than 30% by 2026. In addition, during the conference call, he said, “We will expand our business by more than 50% on average annually by 2026 by adding a content and platform model to our existing business structure.”

[저작권자 @머니투데이, 무단전재 및 재배포 금지]