South Korea’s leading mobile carrier SK Telecom Co.’s president Park Jung-ho said the company will focus on establishing strategic partnerships with world’s best tech companies instead of expanding through mergers and acquisitions for future growth.

“We urgently need to set right direction of our future business rather than focusing on merger and acquisition,” Park told reporters in Las Vegas while attending CES 2017 that ran from January 5 to January 8. “It’s good to be recognized as an M&A specialist, but establishing business ecosystem is more important right now,” he added.

Citing an example of the partnership between SK Holdings C&C of which he served as a chief executive officer until last year and IBM Watson, he said “it’s important to create strategic partnerships with global top companies especially in the field where we lag.” He met with Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of the world’s leading visual computing technology company Nvidia during CES trade show, to discuss ways to form a business partnership. The U.S. technology company has brought revolutionary changes in the gaming industry by inventing high-performance graphics processing units (GPU). It has been aggressively expanding its presence in promising sectors like artificial intelligence, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), cloud computing and autonomous cars. It is developing high-performance processors for driverless cars and showcased a self-driving vehicle equipped with its system at CES 2017.

“Nvidia, a partner with Tesla, has become a rising star at CES 2017 by delivering a keynote address at the event’s preshow,” said Park. “We agreed to jointly develop systems for self-driving cars by converging Nvidia’s system, SK Telecom’s mobile navigation service T-Map and SK C&C’s cloud technologies,” he added.

He also plans to jump on the Internet of Things (IoT) bandwagon. “Although Korea is a latecomer in the IoT market, we can outstrip others in applications of IoT technologies,” he said adding that he would soon announce plans to invest in IoT. “The IoT industry is expected to grow rapidly as tech giants like Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics are going aggressive in the sector,” he said.

By Lim Sung-hyun

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