SK Telecom’s president and CEO Jang Dong-Hyun (pictured) announced a new growth strategy that focuses on three platforms – lifestyle enhancement, advanced media and IoT service — with the aim of finding sustained growth in South Korea’s rapidly changing telco market.

The operator, the country’s largest with a 50 per cent market share, said the new strategy will help it create an open ecosystem powered by its telecoms assets and provide customers with innovative products and services by anticipating their needs.

Through the new initiative, SK Telecom and its subsidiaries aim to reach a combined market value of KRW100 trillion ($91 billion) by 2018.

“To overcome limitations facing the telecoms industry, SK Telecom will actively promote the three platforms to deliver value to customers and build an enriched ICT ecosystem, while making constant efforts to strengthen our network operation capabilities,” Jang said.

To develop the lifestyle enhancement platform, the company set up a group called T Valley earlier this year to work on new business models relevant to customers’ lifestyle and preferences.

The company will build the advanced media platform by strengthening the competitiveness of its existing media services and seeking new media services to proactively respond to the personalisation trend. It expects to sign up 15 million media service customers by 2018.

Its IoT service platform will develop diverse new business models for both individual and enterprise customers. It plans to launch a Smart Home service in May that enables users to control diverse home appliances, including dehumidifiers, door locks and heaters, via smartphones. The service will run on Mobius, an open IoT platform that allows a diverse range of vendors to provide value-added services.

Smart Home will be upgraded to Total Home Care with the addition of IoT features such as home security provided by NSOK, a security and surveillance company acquired by SK Telecom last year.