KT to name final CEO candidate before appointment this month

KT Corp. headquarters in Seoul. [Courtesy of KT]

South Korea’s leading telecommunications provider KT Corp. will announce the final candidate for its chief executive officer on Friday after months of vacancy in the position.

According to KT, the company will select one final candidate by Friday afternoon after in-depth interviews with three contenders, including former LG CNS Co. CEO Kim Young-shub, former KT President Park Yoon-young, and Seoul National University Professor Cha Sang-kyun.

The three contenders have experience in various industries with no background in politics.

Former LG CNS CEO Kim is regarded as a corporate finance expert. He graduated from Korea University with a degree in business administration and joined Lucky Goldstar, the predecessor of LG, where he served as the head of the high-tech business division and the solution business division.

In 2014, he became the chief financial officer and head of the management office at LG Uplus Corp. He retired last year as CEO at LG CNS.

Kim is known to have a deep understanding of the areas of communications and IT due to his career at LG Uplus and LG CNS, while his experience at an industry competitor is seen as a drawback within KT.

Some expect that if Kim becomes the CEO, he will seek to improve business efficiency given his background as a financial executive. During his tenure as CEO at LG CNS, Kim focused on restructuring businesses with poor performance to enhance profitability and improve the company’s overall soundness.

Former KT President Park is considered a long-time employee of KT. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in civil engineering and joined Korea Telecom, now KT, in 1992. He served as the head of the enterprise business division within the company. This is his second attempt to compete for the position, following a previous competition with former CEO Ku Hyeon-mo.

Park is known for his amiable personality and has solid support within the company. However, being an internal candidate is seen as an unfavorable factor for him, given criticism of the selection process as a closed circle.

Seoul National University Professor Cha has served as an outside director of KT from 2012 to 2019. He graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in electrical engineering and received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in the U.S.

He has been teaching at the College of Electrical and Information Engineering at SNU since 1992. He also served as the head of the Big Data Institute and the Graduate School of Data Science at SNU, as well as the chairman for the Korea Electric Power Corp.’s Digital KEPCO project.

Cha was engaged in the development of HANA, the world’s first in-memory database platform used by U.S. big tech companies like Google LLC and Amazon.com. He also founded a company called Transact In Memory Inc. in Silicon Valley in 2002, which later merged with SAP Co. in 2005.

Cha’s relatively short career in the industry, compared to his contenders, is regarded as a drawback.

KT plans to hold an extraordinary shareholders’ meeting this month to appoint the new CEO once the final candidate is nominated. The appointment of the CEO requires more than 60 percent of voting shares to be in favor at the shareholders’ meeting.