Hana Financial Group has contracted Samsung Electronics and SK Telecom to build a private 5G network, becoming the latest South Korean conglomerate to move sensitive internal communications onto dedicated cellular infrastructure rather than public networks or Wi-Fi.

The deal pairs Samsung, which supplies 5G radio and core equipment through its Networks division, with SK Telecom, the country's largest mobile operator by subscribers, as the service partner. SK Telecom has positioned private 5G as a growth business as its consumer mobile market saturates, and has pursued similar enterprise builds with government agencies, manufacturers and transport operators across South Korea.

For Hana Financial Group — one of Korea's largest financial holding companies, spanning banking, securities and insurance operations — the deployment covers its corporate facilities. Financial institutions have emerged as an early adopter segment for private 5G because the technology allows them to keep customer data and internal traffic on infrastructure they control, with network slicing and dedicated spectrum options that Wi-Fi and wired networks do not offer in the same way.

Samsung's role extends its domestic private-network footprint. The vendor competes in this segment against the likes of Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei globally, and in Korea it benefits from proximity to both the operator community and large enterprise customers. SK Telecom, for its part, has been building a private 5G business since regulators opened the way for enterprises and operators to deploy local networks, and it has reported steady growth in signed contracts across industrial and institutional customers.

The commercial logic for the operator is straightforward: private 5G contracts carry multi-year service revenue and stickier customer relationships than consumer mobile lines, which face pricing pressure in Korea's mature market. For Samsung, each enterprise deployment adds reference customers it can cite in international private-network tenders, where the company is trying to expand beyond its handset and chip businesses.

Korean enterprises' adoption of private 5G has been aided by the country's early standalone 5G rollout. SK Telecom launched nationwide standalone 5G in 2020, and that foundation gives enterprise customers a mature core network environment in which local, dedicated deployments can operate.

Financial-sector deployments remain a relatively small share of the private 5G market compared with manufacturing and logistics, so a contract with a group of Hana's scale carries weight as a proof point for the segment. Neither party disclosed the contract value or a detailed deployment timeline in the announcement.

SK Telecom and Samsung say they will expand the partnership with Hana Financial Group as the network comes into service, with additional use cases expected across the group's subsidiaries.