HANCOM changed its corporate name to "HANCOM" 36 years after its founding and declared it would break away from its existing identity as a "Korean-language document processing corporations" and leap forward as an artificial intelligence (AI) corporations.
Kim Yeon-su, HANCOM's CEO, said at the strategy briefing "HANCOM: The Shift," held at the Fairmont Hotel in Yeouido, Seoul, on the 19th, "HANCOM will transition into a 'sovereign agentic operating system (OS)' corporations that oversees and orchestrates the operation of agents." A sovereign agentic OS is an integrated AI agent operating system that consolidates and controls an organization's internal data, external AI models, and existing work systems and authorization frameworks in a single secure environment.
HANCOM will unveil a beta version of the agent OS next month, conduct proof of concept (PoC) in real deployment environments in the second half, and officially launch it next year.
Kim said, "The recent AI market is moving in two directions: 'agentization,' in which AI performs tasks on its own, and 'sovereignization,' which prioritizes data independence," adding that the company will target the public, defense, finance, and healthcare markets, where data cannot be carelessly entrusted to external clouds. HANCOM estimates the global serviceable available market (SAM) for sovereign agentic OS in 2030 at about $700 million–$1 billion (about 10–14 trillion won).
Along with the name change, HANCOM will end its traditional model-year packaged releases with "HANCOM Office 2024" as the last. Going forward, HANCOM Office will be offered as a cloud-based platform in which AI feature enhancements are reflected in real time. Kim said, "HANCOM Office will not be released as new versions but will be operated as a single living AI technology platform," adding, "Customers no longer wait two to three years for a new version of Office, so from now on, the moment AI evolves it will be provided automatically to customers' systems."
The biggest reason HANCOM declared a transition into an AI corporations is that its own AI business is growing rapidly. Last year, the company's stand-alone revenue was 175.3 billion won, up 10% from the previous year (159.1 billion won), and AI revenue accounted for more than half—54.6%—of the 16.2 billion won total increase in revenue. Last year's AI package revenue was about 8.9 billion won, accounting for 5% of total revenue.
This trend has accelerated this year. First-quarter revenue was 46.5 billion won, and AI revenue (5.2 billion won) accounted for 11.21%, a sharp rise from 0.04% a year earlier.
Last year, HANCOM's operating profit was 50.9 billion won, with an operating margin of 29%. The company said it sustained growth without damaging profitability by building a business model that raises average revenue per user (ARPU) by offering AI packages to its existing base of 200,000 customers.
HANCOM said it will leverage its foundational data technologies accumulated over 36 years and its 200,000-customer asset to take the lead in the global sovereign agentic OS market. Based on document parsing (conversion into structured data) and unstructured data processing technologies, the company plans to convert various documents into data that AI can read and support their use within corporations and institutions' internal work systems. In fact, OpenDataLoader (ODL), which HANCOM released as open source in September last year, surpassed 20,000 stars on GitHub, a sign of its recognized technical prowess.
On top of that, it is applying an "open AX standard architecture" that does not depend on a specific large language model (LLM), allowing customers to freely choose and combine the AI models they want. The company's capabilities for building a security control system that guarantees Data Sovereignty have also entered the final stage.
HANCOM plans to start by targeting the European market, where demand for Data Sovereignty is high. Kim said, "Europe is the market where AI sovereignty demands have been institutionalized the fastest in the world, and Europe ranked No. 1 with a 34.2% share in the sovereign AI infrastructure market," adding, "We are about to sign memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with three local partners in Europe."
The company also set an annual revenue target of 210 billion won this year, aiming to surpass 200 billion won in revenue for the first time since its founding.
Kim said, "The name HANCOM was a great starting point that set the standard for Korean-language document processing, but now the scope HANCOM handles has expanded beyond documents to data, beyond computers to AI agents, and beyond Korea to the global stage," adding, "HANCOM has already proven its AI business performance in numbers, and based on that, we are taking on the higher vision of a sovereign agentic OS."