Joint Venture to Focus on Developing 5G Technologies

From left are Vicente Vento, CEO of DTCP, Timotheus Hottges, chairman of Deutsche Telekom, Park Jung-ho, president of SK Telecom and Ha Hyung-il, director of SK Telecom’s Corporate Development Center. They pose for a photo after signing an agreement on SKT’s investment in a DTCP fund.

SK Telecom announced on June 25 that it would accelerate the growth of its 5G global business by partnering with world-class mobile carrier Deutsche Telekom.

SK Telecom and Deutsche Telekom held a big town hall meeting at the Grand Walkerhill Hotel in Seoul on June 24. Some 60 key executives of Deutsche Telekom, including chairman Timotheus Hottges and CTO Claudia Nemat, attended the meeting. From SK Telecom were many officials including CEO Park Jung-ho. Approximately 100 executives from both companies discussed a global 5G business strategy.

The management of Deutsche Telekom showed great interest in 5G services, marketing and network technology of SK Telecom, which succeeded in commercial 5G services for the first time in the world. The German carrier is about to commercialize 5G telecommunications.

SK Telecom has agreed to establish a joint venture with Deutsche Telekom within this year. The two companies signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at the MWC 2019 held earlier this year. The joint venture will develop 5G core technologies such as 5G ultra-low latency MPEG media transport (MMT), 5G repeaters and in-building solutions and the multipath user datagram protocol (UDP).

In addition, they will also continue to band together in mobile edge computing (MEC), application markets and blockchain technology. Based on this partnership, they are planning to aggressively pursue cloud games, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR), which are considered 5G killer services.

Park and Hottges also inked a DTCP fund investment agreement. SK Telecom will invest US$30 million in a US$350 million fund managed by DTCP, an investment company under Deutsche Telekom. They plan to nurture promising information and communication technology (ICT) companies into unicorns.

DTCP will establish an Asian office in Seoul to discover and nurture 5G unicorn companies in Asia. SK Telecom will work with DTCP in selecting and recommending competitive companies.

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