SK Telecom Co., a leading South Korean mobile carrier, said Tuesday its second-quarter operating profit rose 16 percent from a year earlier on the robust performance of its overall business.Operating profit for the April-June period came to 537.5 billion won (US$392 million), compared with 463.4 billion won a year ago, and sales increased 2.7 percent on-year to 4.42 trillion won, the company said in a regulatory filing.Net profit for the period inched up 0.7 percent to 350.2 billion won.The earnings exceeded market expectations. The average estimate of net profit by analysts stood at 346.2 billion won, according to a survey by Yonhap Infomax, the financial data firm of Yonhap News Agency.The Korean company said its mainstay mobile business continued to deliver a strong performance, with the proportion of fifth-generation communications network subscriptions surpassing 70 percent.The number of roaming service subscribers also increased 37 percent to 1.23 million in the second quarter from a year ago .Sales from the enterprise unit climbed 11 percent on-year to 434.2 billion won, and sales from data centers jumped 20.5 percent to 59.5 billion won.Revenue from the cloud business also advanced 28 percent to 39.6 billion won.SK Telecom said it will work to further strengthen its competitiveness in the artificial intelligence (AI) business, including AI data centers and AI services, in the second half.Since announcing its vision to become a global AI company last year, SK Telecom has made a series of investments in AI-related firms.The company invested $20 million in Lambda, a graphics processing unit cloud provider in the United States, $10 million in AI search engine Perplexity and $200 million in AI data center solutions company Smart Global Holdings, this year.Source: Yonhap News Agency