Subscribers Shift to KT and LG Uplus
SK Telecom's Market Share Drops Below 40% for the First Time
SK Telecom's market share in the mobile telecommunications market has fallen below 40% for the first time, as subscriber churn accelerated in the aftermath of the hacking incident.
According to the Ministry of Science and ICT's report on the status of wired and wireless telecommunications service subscriptions and wireless data traffic statistics for May, released on July 18, SK Telecom had 22,499,042 subscribers, accounting for 39.29% of all mobile telecommunications subscribers. This represents a decrease of 0.79 percentage points from 22,924,260 subscribers (40.08%) in April.
As SKT subscribers moved to KT and LG Uplus, the market shares of these two carriers increased. KT had 13,610,780 subscribers (23.77%), and LG Uplus had 11,131,466 subscribers (19.45%), up by 0.32 percentage points and 0.23 percentage points, respectively, compared to April's 13,413,968 subscribers (23.45%) for KT and 10,992,877 subscribers (19.22%) for LG Uplus.
The number of MVNO subscribers increased by 135,997 from April to reach 9,997,971, accounting for 17.47% of the total.
From the hacking incident in April until July 14, when SK Telecom waived the subscriber number portability penalty, a total of 835,214 customers left the company.
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