SK Telecom started an unconventional Smartphone testing called ‘Designed by South Korea and Manufactured by China’, which has South Korea first planning and designing a Smartphone and China assembling it afterwards. Price is greatly reduced while its quality is increased, and it is interesting to see if it will be able to overcome a barrier of ‘Chinese Smartphone’ that is being turned away only in China even though its technologies reached universal standard.
SK Telecom, cooperating with TG N Company, announced that it will be releasing medium to low-priced premium Smartphone called ‘LUNA’ on the 4th and will be receiving reservation membership starting from the 1st.
This Smartphone, which its side and backside are made out of metal, has premium performance such as 5.5-inch full HD large screen, 8 million-pixel front camera (13 million-pixel back camera) with f1.8 aperture value, 3GB RAM, 32GB Memory (it is built in and has SD Card), and others. It also chose Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Application Processor and 2900 mAh battery. Although it has premium performance, its store price was chosen at $338 (400,000 KRW (undecided)) that is almost half of previous premium Smartphones.
A reason why this product is receiving so much attention is because it was produced by a method that is totally different from previous methods.
TG N Company, which is working together with SK Telecom, will be in charge of planning, design, and examination while Taiwan’s Foxconn will be in charge of manufacturing. This kind of work was taking place since a year ago, and SK Telecom acted as a chief inspector that tried to have equipment performance, design, and others to be at South Korean consumers’ standards during this process. It can be analyzed that having subcontractors in charge of major planning and manufacturing work had a great impact in lowering store price.
As Apple oversaw planning and designing processes and had Foxconn be in charge of manufacturing, this confirms a birth of ‘SKT Phone’. Although there was a time when SK Telecom brought in TCL’s ‘Alcatel IDOL Chac’ Smartphone in May, it was not like TCL participated in manufacturing process. This is actually the first time when subcontractors participated even from planning process and produced Smartphones.
Due to an issue of mobile terminal distribution act, there is a new trend where many ‘premium medium to low-priced phones’ such as Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy A8 and others that have high performance but cost about $253 to $422 (300,000 to 500,000 KRW) are being released in Korean cellphone market. If a release of LUNA becomes successful, it is predicted that an introduction of new Smartphone called ‘Planned by South Korea – Manufactured by China’ will be possible.
“Because SK Telecom saw that there will be an increase of customers that want phones with advanced and reasonable price after issue of mobile terminal distribution act, it has been preparing to release LUNA since a year ago. It made a bold cooperation with TG N Company and Foxconn after it decided to step away from cellphone sourcing system that was centered on previous manufacturers.” said one employee from SK Telecom.
Staff Reporter Kim, Yongjoo | kyj@etnews.com