The domestic wired telecom industry is turned out to have achieved a relatively satisfactory performance, in spite of a slowed growth of the IT sector in 2002.
According to the industry on Jan. 5, major wired telecom carriers, including KT, Hanaro Telecom, Dacom, and Onse Telecom, grew 1 to 20% in terms of sales. They are appraised to have made a relatively good record, even though they had bad business conditions like damped IT economy and a heightened sense of crisis in the industry in 2002. In particular, it turns out that some companies are turned to the black ink from the red and that their sales conditions have improved greatly.
For KT, it is estimated that sales increased 1.2% to 11.65 trillion won last year from 11.51 trillion won in the previous year. In the 3rd quarter, the accumulated amount of sales rose about 1% from a year earlier to 8,687.3 billion won. And the net income soared 120% to 1,295.6 billion won. Moreover, as special profits are added up due to stock swapping with SK Telecom, its profits are projected to increase greatly.
According to a temporary tantalization, Hanaro Telecom posted 1,250 billion won in sales last year, a big increase from 880 billion won in 2001. It is analyzed that sales increase in the high-speed Internet service made a critical contribution to the good performance. But the company is estimated to have recorded about 110 billion won of operating loss. It has set the sales goal at 1.57 trillion won this year and expects to achieve 19 billion won of net profit for the first time.
It is temporarily totalized that Dacom posted 1.1 trillion won in sales last year. The company recorded 781.5 billion won of sales and 27.5 billion won of net income until the 3rd quarter and is estimated to have been turned to the black ink in Q4. In 2001, its sales stood at 997.1 billion won, but it was 68.8 billion won in the red.
For Onse Telecom, its sales is estimated to have jumped more than 20% to 365 billion won in 2002 from 295 billion won in the previous year, and its operating profit stood at 6 billion won. But its net loss is expected to have reached 9 billion won. It aims at posting 414 billion won and 6.2 billion won in sales and net income respectively this year.
Meanwhile, it seems that SK Telecom’s sales increased a little from 8.4 trillion won in 2001 to 8.7 trillion won in 2002. In particular, the mobile Internet sector is estimated to have accounted for about 1 trillion won in sales, which shows a tendency that the sector’s proportion is on the rise.