SK Group may beef up reform drive after CEO seminar

South Korea’s energy-to-telecom conglomerate SK Group will hold an annual strategic meeting presided over by its Chairman Chey Tae-won from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, around the time when its two energy units – SK Innovation Co. and SK E&S Co. – is slated to merge to create Asia’s largest energy company.

The annual CEO gathering comes as the country’s No. 2 business group, the parent of electric vehicle battery maker SK On Co., is grappling with a slowdown in EV uptake, while enjoying a heavy order backlog for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), called AI chips.

In last year’s CEO Seminar, Chey warned of “sudden death” if the company fails to agilely adapt to rapidly changing business circumstances.

His warning has spurred the conglomerate’s restructuring drive, combining subsidiaries with overlapping business portfolios and unloading non-core assets. Early this year, it reintroduced Saturday gatherings of its CEOs after a 20-year hiatus.

SK Group controls hundreds of companies across four mainstay sectors – semiconductor and materials; energy and chemicals; information and communications technology; and logistics, services and bio.

The parent of SK Hynix Inc., the world’s No. 1 HBM producer, aims to deepen its AI value chains from AI semiconductors to AI data centers and AI assistants. It is also pivoting toward clean energy such as hydrogen and renewables.

Some 30 top executives of the group’s subsidiaries and Chey Chang-won, head of its top advisory group SK SUPEX council, are expected to participate in the CEO gathering to be held at the Icheon SKMS Institute, its research center in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province.

They will review the progress of the group-wide restructuring and exchange views about the changing business environment triggered by AI market expansion and global geographical uncertainties, according to SK Group officials.

The CEO Seminar takes place every October. It is one of the group’s key strategic CEO meetings, along with the Icheon Forum held in August and the June management strategy conference.

JOB CUTS, RESTRUCTURING

The group is now implementing bolder restructuring actions. SK On, the world’s fifth-largest EV battery maker, is offering its first-ever voluntary redundancy program. 

Its sister companies are likely to join the job cut spree. It is said that mobile carrier SK Telecom Co. and other major SK Group units were ordered to cut C-suite jobs around the time of their annual executive reshuffles between November and December.

SK Ecoplant Co., a construction engineering and waste management company, recently unloaded its entire stake in US-based lithium-ion battery recycling firm Ascend Elements Inc. to Seoul-based private equity firm SKS Private Equity for about $98 million.

In July, the company said it is seeking to absorb its two subsidiaries: Essencore Ltd., a semiconductor module producer and SK Materials Airplus Inc., an industrial gas supplier.

In August, SKC Ltd., a chemicals materials producer, announced a merger with its biodegradable material subsidiaries, SK Leaveo and SK TBMGeostone.

SK Inc., the group's holding company, has put its wholly owned specialty gas producer SK Specialty Co. up for sale to raise around 4 trillion won ($3 billion), according to sources in August.

Write to Hyung-Kyu Kim at khk@hankyung.com
 


Yeonhee Kim edited this article.