Due to the effects of the hacking incident, SK Telecom's share of the mobile communication market fell below 40% for the first time as of May this year.
According to the subscriber status of wired and wireless communication services and wireless data traffic statistics announced by the Ministry of Science and ICT on the 18th, SK Telecom had 22,499,042 subscribers, which accounted for 39.29% of all mobile communication subscribers.
This is a decrease of 0.79 percentage points from the subscriber count of 22,924,260 (40.08%) in April. This is the first time SK Telecom has lost its 40% share.
KT and LG Uplus recorded 13,617,780 (23.77%) and 11,131,466 (19.45%), respectively. This represents an increase of 0.32 percentage points and 0.23 percentage points compared to April, when the counts were 13,413,968 (23.45%) and 1,992,877 (19.22%).
The number of budget phone subscribers increased by 135,997 from April to 9,997,971, accounting for 17.47% of the total.
Following the hacking incident in April, a total of 835,214 customers left SK Telecom until the 14th, when the company waived the number portability fee. The total number of subscribers decreased by 601,376.