SK Telecom to open online mall

Seoul: SK Telecom Co, South Korea's top mobile phone operator, said yesterday it would open an online marketplace at the end of the year and had bought a small online book store to gain e-commerce expertise.

SK, which has half of South Korea's 42 million mobile phone users, is targeting the country's rapidly growing $14 billion e-commerce market as high-speed mobile technologies enable mobile commerce using full Internet browsing on phones.

The company said in a statement it had bought morning365.com, a domestic web-based book store with 580,000 members. SK did not disclose the value of the acquisition.

SK said its e-commerce mall would include both a customer-to-customer market and shopping malls for specific products. "We will build the online marketplace on our own, but we decided to buy morning365 to acquire management know-how in specialised shopping malls," SK said.

SK's entry should up the ante in an already crowded e-commerce market, which is expected to grow more than 20 per cent a year on the back of broadband penetration that is approaching 80 per cent.