HIGHLIGHTS
- LG has been seeing losses in smartphone segment for many quarters now
- The CEO seems optimistic about the future of its smartphone segment
- He said the company has planned a few ‘wow factors’ for customers
phone in India, and LG Electronics CEO Kwon Bong-seok has announced that the company plans to make the smartphone business profitable by 2021. He didn’t detail on how the company will manage to make that happen, but said that it looks to expand its “mobile lineup and steadily release new [smartphones] attached with some wow factors to woo consumers.”
The CEO spoke to reporters at a CES press conference in Las Vegas, claiming that the dwindling smartphone will become profitable once again. He claimed that this feat will be achieved by 2021. “LG Electronics mobile business is going to be profitable by 2021. I can say we can make that happen as LG Electronics will expand our mobile lineup and steadily release new ones attached with some wow factors to woo consumers,” he said (via Korea Times). He didn’t go into detail on what those ‘wow factors’ may be, and didn’t want to dwell on the tanking profit numbers either.
The report says that LG is expected to generate KRW 98.6 billion in operating profit for Q4 2019, much less that the KRW 270 billion operating profit that was predicted by market analysts. As part of its cost cutting efforts, the company even relocated its smartphone production unit from Pyeongtaek in South of Seoul to Haiphong in Vietnam in 2019.
He also spoke about the emerging 8K TV segment, and said that it will still take time to get an ‘explosive response’. “The reason why we put up the banner of ‘OLED first’ is to suggest using OLED panels for 8K TV is the right direction. We don’t expect an explosive response for an 8K TV in the market. It needs more time given broadcasters are not ready yet (to broadcast their content in 8K resolution),” he said. He also confirmed that the rollable TV demoed at CES 2020 will be launched in the first half or latest by the third quarter of 2020.
