State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

This post continues the coverage of Korea technology show in Texas. The event included an exhibition and  a luncheon in which representatives from SK Telecom, Nokia, ATT, Verizon and Sprint spoke about the Future of Communications. SK Telecom was represented by Brian Kim, VP of Global Technology Partnership and it was the most interesting and engaging talk.

The underlying themes for SK Telecom were Global expansion and Convergenceof services and technology. SK Telecom wants to do more and want to go global. Their stake in China Unicom is doing well but their joint venture in US by the name of Helio is consuming funds with not much progress to show. The timing works well. Note that their decision to invest in Pakistan has not been made official and the current situation may impact the decision.

In his talk, Brian Kim empahsised was on the youth in Korea. With a large tech savvy user base who are in their 20s and 30s, Korean companies have to offer the best in usability and features. For SKT, ubiquitous music service by the name of Melon is a major source of revenue and attracts subscribers. Reason? low monthly price and ease of use.

It is apparent that SKT has spent much effort to sutdy youth behavior and demographics. For example it was mentioned that the average commute time is 40 minutes so that becomes threshold for content on mobile devices. Other data services are also growing - as you can see from the above shown slide.

Here’s an exclusive coverage of Korea technology show in Dallas this week. Even though large Korean companies such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai are well-known all over the world there are many small to medium sized Korean companies which are working hard to establish themselves. This exhibition was part of this effort by these electronic and telecom firms to market their products in US.

The event included an exhibition and a Future of Communications Forum in which SK Telecom, Nokia, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon presented. I attended the exhibition and the talk. I was very impressed by the level of innovation, quality of products and the effort to market their work with high quality presentation material and politeness. In this post I’d like to share some of the interesting products I saw there. In later posts I’ll cover other companies and related topics (such as WiBro) in more details. There will be a separate post about the presentation by SK Telecom on the telecom trends.

In the exhibition there were over 50 companies covering telecom (IPTV, VOIP, telecom infrastructure), electronics (home and portable electronics, bluetooth multimedia, PC components) and home/office security monitoring.  There were quite a few medium sized companies and startups in the telecom field; here’s a brief lineup of the prominent telecom companies - please visit their site for more info. You can also contact me for details to know further about my discussions with these company representatives. 

• BlueBird Soft - PDAs for consumer and business use
• Ace Antenna - E-tilt antennas
• Gamma Nu - IMD free antennas
• Modafun - Portable wireless router
• SOLiD Technologies - Interference cancelling repeater
• Shell-line - Slide hinge modules
• NextLink - Interference cancelling repeater
• Sunwoo - Interface cancellation systems
• Korchip - Electric double layer capacitor

Please stay tuned for more coverage of the exhibition and event.