Telkom said on Friday it was in talks about selling 20% of its equity to Korea’s telecommunications giant KT Corp (formerly Korea Telecom). But what is KT Corp?
KT is Korea’s largest provider of fixed and mobile telephone services, and high-speed broadband fibre-to-the-home services. It also offers Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and satellite services.
The company provides high-speed fibre connections into millions of Korean homes, with many of these offering speeds of 1Gbit/s.
Korea’s government is keen to install fibre in every Korean home by the end of this year. KT, with SK Telecom and CJ Hellovision, is one of the main contributors to the project.
KT’s head office is in the city of Seongnam and the company employs about 35 000 people. It became a public company in 1981 and at that stage there were 4,5m telephone lines in South Korea. By 1993, the company had increased that number to 20m.
The company was privatised in 2002, and in 2009 it merged with its mobile subsidiary, KTF. It now offers converged fixed and mobile services.
It was also the first company to offer the iPhone in Korea and last year released a cloud-based service called uCloud that offers storage as well as cloud-based software and services.
KT has total assets of 18,7 trillion won (R127bn). Its shares are listed on the Korean, New York and London stock exchanges.
According to Bloomberg data, KT has 16m mobile subscribers, 7,6m fixed broadband Internet users and 2,5m IPTV subscribers. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral
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