SK Telecom reports $3.8B in revenue for Q2
Korean operator SK Telecom said it ended the second quarter of 2016 with 20 million subscribers in the 4G LTE segment, surging 11.7% compared to the same quarter the previous year.
SK Telecom also said that 21.3 million customers were using smartphones at the end of Q2, climbing 6.7% year-over-year.
The carrier launched LTE service in July 2011, commercialized 150 megabits per second updates in June 2013, and 225 Mbps LTE-Advanced services in June 2014 through carrier aggregation. The telco more recently launched 300 Mbps tri-band LTE-A capabilities in mid-2015.
Total mobile subscriptions totaled 29.15 million at the end of June, up 3% year-over-year. During Q2, SK Telecom recorded a net addition of 229,000 mobile subscribers.
SK Telecom recorded consolidated revenue of 4.26 trillion won ($3.79 billion) in the second quarter of 2016, up 0.3% year-on-year. Net profit for the period amounted to 291 billion won, compared to 398 billion won in Q2 2015. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization totaled 1.16 trillion won for the quarter, up 0.7% year-on-year, while capital expenditures for Q2 totaled 234 billion won, compared to 348 billion won in Q2 2015.
For full 2016, the Korean operator said total capital expenditure will reach 2.1 trillion won.
SK Telecom secured a pair of bandwidth blocks – 10 megahertz and 20 megahertz – in the 2.6 GHz band at the spectrum auction held in Korea in May. The operator confirmed plans to rollout an LTE network using the 30 megahertz bandwidth in the 2.6 GHz band, covering Seoul and six metropolitan cities by the end of 2016, main areas of 85 cities nationwide by the end of 2017 and all areas of the 85 cities by the end of 2018. SK Telecom said the new network will cover 90% of the Korean population by the end of 2018.
Last month, SK Telecom completed the deployment of a Long Range Wide Area Network across the country, covering 99% of the population. The company also completed nationwide LTE-M rollout in March.
SoftBank counts more than 32M mobile subscribers at the end of fiscal Q1
In related news, Japanese telco SoftBank ended the first quarter of fiscal year 2016 with 32.15 million mobile subscribers after a net addition of 112,000 subscribers during the period.
SoftBank offers TDD-LTE and FDD-LTE services across Japan, launching the networks in 2012.
The number of units sold for main subscribers of mobile communications services for fiscal Q1 increased by 155,000 year-on-year to 2.35 million.
The company’s overall revenue for the quarter reached 2.12 trillion yen ($20.3 billion), climbing 2.9% year-over-year. Net profits for the period reached 272.3 billion yen, up 8.9% compared to fiscal Q1 2015.
The Japanese company recently agreed to a $32 billion deal to acquire U.K.-based chip designer ARM Holdings.
