SK Telecom reported poor performance in the second quarter due to various increases in expenses resulting from the hacking incident.
SK Telecom announced on the 6th that its operating profit for the second quarter of 2025, on a consolidated financial statement basis, was 338.3 billion won, a decrease of 37.07% compared to the previous year. Revenue was 4.5115 trillion won, down 1.89% from the previous year.
A representative of SK Telecom explained, "The operating profit plummeted due to the reflection of one-time expenses such as costs for replacing customer SIM cards and compensating losses to agencies caused by the hacking incident." According to industry sources, about 200 billion won was spent solely for the replacement of SIM cards.
The decrease in revenue due to subscriber churn also affected profitability. Following the hacking incident that erupted in April, subscribers who felt uneasy left in droves for other telecommunications companies, causing the market share to change from the 40% range to the 30% range. According to the Ministry of Science and ICT, as of May, the number of subscribers of SK Telecom, excluding other lines, was 22,138,806, accounting for 39.2% of the total mobile telecommunications subscribers. The Korea Telecommunications Operators Association (KTOA) reported that the number of subscribers who switched numbers from April, when the hacking incident occurred, to June reached 630,000.
To prevent subscriber churn, SK Telecom has significantly increased the sales incentives and the rise in marketing expenditures is reported to have contributed to the profitability decline in the second quarter.
Despite the overall business performance worsening due to the hacking incident, revenue from artificial intelligence (AI) business, which is a future growth driver, was reported to have increased by 13.9% year-on-year to 155.5 billion won. Revenue from the AI data center (DC) business in the second quarter was 108.7 billion won, up 13.3% from the previous year, while revenue from the AIX business reached 46.8 billion won, a 15.3% increase compared to the previous year. SK Telecom noted, "The increase in AI DC utilization and the expansion of B2B (business-to-business) AI solution sales drove the revenue growth." As of the end of July, SK Telecom's AI agent service 'adot' surpassed 10 million cumulative subscribers, and the recently launched 'adot Note' and 'Briefing' beta service recorded 800,000 cumulative users within a month.
SK Telecom is accelerating the construction of an 'AI infrastructure superhighway' focusing on three pillars: ▲ AI DC ▲ GPU cloud service (GPUaaS) ▲ Edge AI. In June, it announced plans to invest trillions of won in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SK Group member companies to establish the largest hyper-scale AI dedicated data center in the country, with a capacity of 103 MW. Through this, SK Telecom expects to secure a total data center capacity of over 300 MW by 2027. SK Telecom stated, "As a result, annual revenue of over 1 trillion won is anticipated after 2030."