[Click eStock] "SK Telecom, Target Price Maintained at 77,000 Won"

Daishin Securities maintained a buy rating and a target price of 77,000 KRW for SK Telecom on the 10th.

Last September, SK Telecom unveiled its AI strategy (AI Pyramid). The strategy involves three stages: starting with AI infrastructure in the first stage, moving to AI transformation leveraging telecommunications strengths in the second stage, and finally providing AI personal assistants in the third stage. The plan is to simultaneously enhance the completeness of each stage.

Over the past year, the AI strategy has evolved more concretely. Each stage of the pyramid is being advanced through a two-track approach of bold external collaborations and in-house solution development.

As a result of the first stage AI infrastructure, the data center revenue is expected to double from 120 billion KRW in 2021 to around 240 billion KRW in 2024. To strengthen the AI data center business, global collaborations are being implemented. In February this year, SK Telecom made a $20 million equity investment in Lambda, a GPU cloud company, and plans to provide services within the year. An agreement was signed with Supermicro, a global server and storage system manufacturer, for the global AI data center business. In July, a $200 million investment was made in SGH, a server clustering company. The data centers, including AI data centers, are planned to expand from the current 100MW to 200MW by 2030.

By building a telecommunications (Telco) large language model (LLM), SK Telecom launched the world’s first Telco-LLM. In 2023, it invested $100 million in Entropic, which is valued at over 25 trillion KRW. The company is advancing the AI personal assistant solution, A. Dot.

SK Telecom is pushing for the merger of Sapeon and Rebellion, in which it holds a 62.5% stake. The integrated corporation, valued at approximately 1.1 trillion KRW, is expected to launch within the year.

As a result of the second stage AI transformation, SK Telecom maintains a solid No. 1 position with 16 million 5G subscribers and a 48% market share. In the first half of this year, enterprise sales increased by 27% compared to the same period last year.

In the third stage AI service sector, SK Telecom launched iPhone call recording last October. By September this year, it secured over 5 million customers through updates such as the multi-LLM agent.