SK Telecom Jin Yongzhe: 220 million App Downloads from T-Store

During the same panel “The Platform Battle: Marketplaces and Operating Systems” (see our other coverage earlier), Jin Yongzhe, vice president of SK Telecom China, attended Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. He introduced that SK Telecom’s App store, T-Store, has already had 7 million users, 24,000 partners and 220 million App downloads since Sep.2009.

He also revealed that, in order to improve the current situation for the connection among App stores from globalwide, SK Telecom together with other major operators worldwide was trying to create a platform with mutual standards.

Gang (=G): In your opinion, for telecom operators and operating system providers, what would be the direction of their future development? And how do you feel if they are all in the cloud and become a cloud system?

Jin Yongzhe (=J): Allow me to introduce our current situation first. We hold Android and Windows Mobile now, and we have one operator.We have a very strong database which shows very good understanding to our clients’ needs. We cooperate with these manufacturers, so they can response to our demandings efficiently. For App Store, SK Telecom launched our own store T-Store in Sep.2009. Currently, we owned 7 million users, almost 24,000 partners and 220 million App downloads.

According to (K-Touch’s) Mr. Rong’s concern that paying method may not be simple enough and with limitation. In our case, our T-Stores has lots of telecommunications which makes paying very simple with flexible paying methods. We also provide our partners excellent support and friendly environment. From a global point of view, there are about 50 main App stores worldwide,running by mobilephone manufacturers or operating system providers. Now the problem is, the market is too open for everyone with various stores and platforms. It’s a challenge for developers and also a difficult question for our users that they need to choose one mobile or platform from a dozen. For us, it’s really hard for telecom operators to find a way so we can support all the terminal users while they are all using different OS and different platforms.

In order to overcome this problem, our International customer service department released a new system 2 years ago. SK Telecom together with other major operators worldwide was trying to create such a platform with mutual standards that one game app developed on one platform can entirely be used on another. We will continue to work on in this area.

G: Is China also doing the same thing now?

J: Yes, actually China telecoms operators are new to this arena. As for SK, cloud platform is a key thing to do right now, and on this platform we can provide much better services. As Mr. Yong mentioned previously, in my point of view, Standard Web is also a trend in the future. Such development, like cloud computing, could be more simplified, though it still takes a lot of time for now.