International Moves

Just when you're least expecting it, the international players sneak up on you.

In early February, KDDI, Softbank and SK Telecom began testing joint NFC services for Japanese/Korean customers. This is an important move because both Korea and Japan are considered frontrunners in mobile payment technologies. This partnership will not only be one of the first cross-border partnership among mobile industry leaders, but also pulls in other major industry players like Mastercard (using their PayPass service) and "new channels" like smart posters (the pilot between the two includes posters equipped with NFC-compatible RFID tags placed in 110 locations in Tokyo and 150 locations in Seoul).

This also seems to be a direct challenge to another partnership also announced in early February between NTT Docomo and KT Telecom. Interestingly enough, NTT Docomo boasts over 50% of the carrier market in Japan, whereas SK Telecom boasts over 50% of the market in Korea. Makes me think that each country is making a play to expand in opposing directions....

In another interesting note, after SK Telecom's acquisition of an almost-majority of Hana Financial Services' (yup, of Hana Bank fame) credit card group in late 2009, Hana and SK Telecom quickly came up with SIM card based contactless payments/promotions service (in March 2010). This is interesting because SK telecom has recently made moves to offer Groupon-like services in Korea (announced April 2011), teamed up with China for mobile game development (announced April 2011) and also has been rumored to be thinking about bidding on Blockbuster (announced March 2011). Looks like SK Telecom is positioning itself to be a value-addedservices monster.

What does this mean to us though? Well, it seems that SK Telecom is really looking at the whole thing from a global scale, which is interesting because it's targeting very American companies (Blockbuster) as a potential growth trigger.  I guess we'll see....