Jaeheon Jung, chief executive of SK Telecom, urged employees to become a united “dream team” to mark the new year. He said he aims to drive change through a solid, customer-centred mobile communications business.

Jung delivered the message in a New Year address to employees on Jan. 2. “Let’s gather healthy energy toward the direction of change for an SKT that is running again,” he said. “Our ultimate purpose is to ensure the company endures and develops permanently, and to pass it on to the next generation as a reliable foundation for life,” he added.

Jung first stressed the importance of the mobile network operator (MNO) business. “Let’s put customers, the essence of our work, at the centre and deepen our fundamentals to build a solid MNO,” he said. “When pride takes root in our hearts, customers will also be proud to be with SKT,” he added.

He also said the company will step up innovation based on AI. “Just as the path we have walked became the history of telecommunications in South Korea, we will become the main characters who write a new history on the stage of AI as well,” he said. “Let’s create a virtuous cycle in which anyone can use AI to produce their own valuable results, and the company’s growth also raises our quality of life together,” he added.

At the organisational level, he stressed bringing capabilities together as a “dream team”. “Our change is completed when everyone is reborn as a dream team that becomes one,” he said. “Let’s become one team that looks in the same direction, adds each other’s capabilities, walks together and overcomes any difficulty,” he added.

“All great change first seems impossible and demands patience, but in the end it is remembered as brilliant growth,” he said. “Let us all become the main characters of change and walk forward together, step by step, without wavering,” he added.