Yoo Young-bin, a senior researcher at Korea Ratings, pointed out, "If subscriber churn continues while new subscriber recruitment is suspended, we cannot rule out the possibility of SK Telecom's market position declining," adding, "Weakening subscriber base and increased marketing expenditure to maintain market share could have a greater impact on credit rating than SIM replacement costs and fines." For the first quarter alone, KT is expected to surpass SK Telecom with an operating profit of 699 billion won compared to SK Telecom's 559 billion won. As SK Telecom's performance impact related to the SIM hacking incident is expected to be reflected from the second quarter, the performance gap between the two companies may widen further. However, there are also predictions that fines for personal information leakage may not reach astronomical levels.