SK Telecom is Korea's largest wireless carrier trying to prove that last year's universal subscriber identity module breach is a closed chapter rather than a permanent tax on the franchise, even as it recapitalizes the data-center business with outside money. The second-quarter print shows operating profit leaping because the year-ago quarter still carried replacement and remediation costs, not because wireless service revenue is growing again. That split is the whole case. Shareholders are being asked to treat a repaired cash engine as the funding base for an AI infrastructure platform that KKR and a Korean private-equity consortium have now agreed to help capitalize.
Mobile service revenue is still slightly lower than a year earlier, and the handset base has only just stopped shrinking after last year's exodus. Churn has cooled back toward the pre-incident range, which is the first evidence that the customer-trust campaign is more than messaging. Beside that slow repair, AI data-center revenue nearly doubled from a small base, helped by Pangyo utilization and the start of a new Seoul facility. Management then carved the data-center and submarine-cable assets out of SK Broadband, named the vehicle SK Horizon, and signed an equity commitment of about $2.2 billion that leaves SK Telecom with a controlling majority stake.
The dividend is back at a quarterly KRW 830 after the prior year-end payout was cancelled. That reinstatement tells investors the board thinks the cash engine can again support a regular distribution. The American depositary shares closed near $36 on the publication date, a level that already prices a completed wireless recovery plus some value for the Horizon option. The open question is whether mobile service revenue can stop falling before gigawatt-scale construction starts testing the dividend and the balance sheet.