In a regular series, Mobile World Live‘s Asia Editor Joseph Waring provides a regional roundup of news snippets:

Samsung’s wage bill dropped in 2014
Samsung Electronics reduced its spending on wages last year by 0.3 per cent to KRW9.3 trillion ($8.44 billion) despite expanding its workforce 3.7 per cent to 99,386.

The company announced earlier it is freezing pay for its employees this year, although performance incentives, which depend on profits, will not be affected, Yonhap news agency reported.

The company, whose profit fell 23 per cent year-on-year to KRW23.4 trillion last year, also reduced its advertising spending by 26 per cent to KRW734.8 billion, according to market tracker Chaebul.com.

China’s first 1-million subscriber MVNO
Chinese MVNO Snail Mobile announced it has signed up one million subscribers since launching last August – consolidating its position as the country’s largest MVNO.

Snail Mobile, which is well-know for its online games and is transferring that experience to mobile, has launched extensive promotional campaigns to drive uptake of its “free” SIM card offering, which doesn’t clear a user’s surplus data balance at the end of each month, C114.net said.

Pakistan’s SIM verification campaign slows
Pakistan’s five mobile operators have verified 74 million SIMs, or 72 per cent of the country’s 103 million SIM cards. But the Express Tribune reported today that the campaign that is scheduled to end 13 April has lost momentum, with the number of SIMs processed per day dropping from 1.3 million to 250,000 in the final phase.

A government official said the problem is that since the first phase (for those with more than two SIMs), which ended 27 February, people with one or two SIMs weren’t blocked, so they assumed the government had backed off the deadline.

The person said that the government won’t extend the deadline and all unverified SIMs will be blocked after 13 April.

Almost 11 million SIMs have been blocked.

LG Uplus launches LTE smart-car service
South Korea’s LG Uplus has launched an LTE-based service that can monitor and analyse a vehicle’s performance in real time.

The monitoring system, called Telematics in Athena or TiA, allows drivers to check data like fuel consumption on their smartphones. It can also send alerts when the engine needs servicing or the oil needs to be changed.

The service will first be offered for Volkswagen cars and will be expanded to other brands, the Korea Herald said.