VK Mobile

~ the obituary ~

There is an entire layer of the mid-2000s handset market that never reached a shop window in Turkey. Ours ran on Nokia mostly, with Siemens underneath it. Samsung arrived late and then arrived very hard. Korean manufacturers who were not Samsung or LG did not get past the carriers here, which means VK Mobile is a company I could have picked up in a shop in Seoul or London and never once in Ankara.

VK stood for Viable Korea. It started in 1997 importing lithium-ion polymer cells for other people's phones and began making its own in 2000. The name went on a handset in 2001, though some accounts put that a year later. The progression is worth sitting with. A phone in 2001 was substantially a battery with a screen and a radio bolted to it, so a battery company deciding to build the rest was a shorter step than it sounds like now.

The CEO was Yi Cheol-sang, who had been a well-known figure in the South Korean student movement before he was a hardware executive. That biography is not rare among Korean businesspeople of his generation. It is still a strange thing to read directly above a list of clamshell model numbers.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was selling ~

VK made small phones and exported them everywhere it could get a carrier to answer the phone. Japan and China were the primary targets, with the European operators next and North America somewhere after that. The technology was CDMA and PCS, which is the Korean domestic standard set, and the strategy was the one every second-tier Asian manufacturer ran that decade. Undercut the majors on price while matching them on the spec sheet, then get onto a subsidized lineup and hope volume covers the margin.

For about two years it worked. Sales in 2004 came to nearly 400 billion won, roughly $427 million at the exchange rates of the time. For a company four years into building phones that is a real business rather than a rounding error in somebody else's annual report.

~ the funny part ~

What broke it was Europe. In 2005 VK bought a French handset company called VMTS, which was expensive, and closed that year with a loss of 65 billion won against the previous year's 400 billion in sales. The purchase was supposed to buy a route into European carriers. What it actually bought was a second set of fixed costs in a market where Nokia was at the absolute peak of its power and everybody who was not Nokia was already bleeding.

The end was small and undignified next to those numbers. VK missed a payment of 2.8 billion won, then another of 3.5 billion, and went to court carrying 1.78 billion won owed to creditors. On 7 july 2006 it was declared bankrupt. A company that had moved close to half a billion dollars of product two years earlier went down over sums that would not have covered a European ad campaign.

~ what it became ~

Nothing, honestly. Nobody bought the brand and relaunched it, and there is no revival account posting renders of a VK2000 concept. The phones survive on parts listings and in repair manual archives, which is where hardware goes when it is neither loved enough to be collected nor recent enough to be recycled.

The pattern outlived the company. Pantech, a far larger Korean manufacturer, went into court receivership in 2014 for what amounts to the same reason: a second-tier maker with real engineering and real volume, sitting between a giant above it and Chinese factories arriving underneath. Korea ended up with two phone companies. It was never going to end up with more, and VK found that out first.

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