LG Electronics’ journey in the mobile phone industry has foundered. This is marked by the approval of the closure of the LG mobile phone business by the company’s board of directors.
The company has also announced that the process of closing the LG cellphone business will be completed in the middle of the year, to be precise July 31, 2021.
The closure that occurred in LG’s cellphone division was inseparable from the losses the company had borne since six years ago.
In the second quarter of 2015, LG announced a number of losses in the mobile phone sales business of 4.5 billion US dollars or around Rp 65 trillion.
Although sometimes common to a company, however, the losses suffered by LG lasted quite a long time. The business condition of LG cellphones is reportedly getting worse every year.
This continued into the third quarter of 2017, when the company announced a total loss of 375.3 billion Won or around 331.37 million US dollars.
Seeing losses continue to occur, LG wants to turn things around by launching the G6 Series flagship phone. This decision bears sweet fruit.
Sales of the G6 Series mobile phones were able to boost the company’s revenue to reach US $ 3.2 million in the first quarter of 2017.
However, these efforts have not been able to cover the losses that have been borne by the company so far. In the second quarter of 2017, LG was reported to be losing money again.
Then at the end of 2018, LG recorded an income of 7 billion US dollars. Meanwhile, the total losses increased again to 700 million US dollars.
Summarized by KompasTekno from XDA Developers, Tuesday (6/4/2021), until 2020, the total losses suffered by LG reached 751 million US dollars or around Rp. 10.9 trillion.
LG is again trying to implement a new strategy by launching one of its unique mobile phones, namely the LG Wing.
Unlike other foldable phones, the LG Wing is designed with two screens. Either of the screens can be rotated up to 90 degrees.
The company claims that the rotated screen will last up to 200,000 turns with an average of 100 movements per day for five years.
Apart from coming up with an innovative concept, the LG Wing also has quite qualified specifications. The LG Wing is powered by a Snapdragon 765G 5G chipset combined with 8GB RAM and 256GB internal.
However, the LG Wing failed to lift LG from its slump. LG, which initially targeted 2 million cellphone shipments, only managed to ship 50,000 cellphones.
The lack of sales of the LG Wing unit has also been influenced by Samsung. In the near future of the launch of LG Wings, Samsung first released its newest flagship Galaxy Note, the Galaxy Note 20.
This led to the sales of LG Wing cellphones which only reached a total of 10 percent of all Galaxy Note 20 units that Samsung successfully shipped.
The latest attempt seems to mark LG’s last attempt at trying to survive in the smartphone industry. Because in January 2021, LG reportedly wanted to sell its cellphone business to a conglomerate company from Vietnam, Vingroup Co.
It seems that this did not materialize because there were several options which were allegedly not agreed upon by the two parties.
After closing the cellphone business in July, LG said it would shift its focus to other business fields, such as electric vehicle components, smart devices, robotics technology, Artificial Intelligence (artificial intelligence, AI), and other platforms in various lines. {compass}
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