SK Square to Demand Metaverse Presence for Portfolio Companies: Report

SK Square, the investment spinoff of SK Telecom, wants all its portfolio companies to have a metaverse presence, Bloomberg reported.

“Our business needs to evolve into the metaverse,” SK Square Managing Director Huh Seok-joon said in an interview with Bloomberg. In the future, customers will interact with companies through the metaverse rather than mobile phones, and crypto tokens will become native currencies for their platforms, he said.
SK Telecom is owned by SK Group, one of South Korea’s largest companies. The metaverse requirement stands in contrast to the traditional investments made by the country’s conglomerates, which tend to be focus on industries such as pharmaceuticals, logistics and manufacturing rather than the intangible, digital world.
The metaverse, a shared digital environment that mimics elements of the real world, has come increasingly into focus in recent months. In October, Facebook’s parent company renamed itself Meta to reflect its aspirations to be active in that type of environment, and plots of virtual real estate have been selling at record prices.
The metaverse represents a market opportunity of more than $1 trillion annual revenue, crypto investment giant Grayscale said in a report last month. (Grayscale is owned by Digital Currency Group, the parent company of CoinDesk.)
SK Square owns stakes in companies including chipmaker SK Hynix, where it is the largest shareholder, as well as 11street, an online shopping mall, and TMap Mobility, a ride services provider, Bloomberg said. Last month, it bought a minority stake in crypto exchange Korbit.

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The requirement marks a move into a new environment compared with the traditional investments of South Korea’s largest industry groups.