For the quarter ended 30 September 2019, SK Telecom announced revenue of KRW 4.561 trillion, operating income of KRW 302.1 billion, and net income of KRW 274.4 billion. On a consolidated basis, SK Telecom’s revenue increased by 9.0% and operating income decreased by 0.7%, remaining similar to 2018’s figures. Net income increased by 5.9% compared to the previous quarter.

Even though the company’s investment in 5G infrastructure during the quarter had depressed products, the operator expanded its 5G subscriber base past 1.54 million as of the end of September 2019. Nearly half of the company’s revenues came from businesses other than core mobile communication business and one of the mainstays in this other business was media. Indeed the company went as far as to say that media business was getting ready to take off based on strong growth of IPTV revenue, an increase of 14.0% year-on-year and 3.6% quarter-to-quarter to KRW 333.7 billion.

In September 2019, SK Telecom launched the Wavve OTT media service by integrating oksusu with POOQ,  and the company announced plans to secure 5 million paid subscribers by 2023.