The heads of South Korean mobile operator SK Telecom (SKT) and China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba met in Seoul to discuss developing a blueprint for new ICT industries and building a bridge between South Korea and China to improve bilateral cooperation.

SKT CEO and president Park Jung-ho (pictured, left) and Alibaba founder and executive chairman Jack Ma (pictured, right) met at SKT’s headquarters to share thoughts on next-generation ICT sectors such as artificial intelligence and 5G, and agreed to seek business opportunities in areas including next-generation media and content.

In a statement SKT said: “After hearing about the ICT blueprint we have envisioned, chairman Jack Ma gladly accepted our invitation.”

The companies plan to hold a senior leadership-level meeting where they will look to develop mid- to long-term innovation plans in new ICT areas and together expand the fourth industrial revolution and ICT ecosystems.

Alibaba, with a market value of $472 billion and $23 billion in revenue in 2016, said in October 2017 it expects to invest more than $15 billion in R&D over three years, with the intention of working in areas including data intelligence, IoT and human-machine interaction.

SKT, the largest mobile operator in South Korea with a 48 per cent share of the country’s mobile connections, is pushing to be the first in the country to launch commercial 5G service and recently conducted trials using two self-driving vehicles which shared traffic information via its pre-standard 5G network. The trials were held in Korea’s K-City pilot city for autonomous driving.