LG To Shutdown Mobile Phone Business
On April 5th, 2021, The board of directors of LG Electronics Inc. (LG) in Seoul, approved the company’s decision of shutting the mobile phone business unit globally.
“LG’s strategic decision to exit the incredibly competitive mobile phone sector will enable the company to focus resources in growth areas such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence, and business-to-business solutions, as well as platforms and services.” Said the company in a statement.
LG has always been innovating in the mobile phone arena, the wide-angle camera that is available in almost all phones today was a feature first launched by LG, Similarly LG phones almost always came with military-grade durability with MIL-STD-810G compliance. Inbuilt Quad DAC, Pro Video Modes, self-healing back from the LG G Flex 2, the company has always been innovating. Sadly, this did not translate into sales. Once Number 3 in mobile phones, The company has been struggling with sales for quite some time now. According to counterpoint research, LG Mobile’s market share has been below 2 percent since the third quarter of 2019. The company did try to bring LG Wing in October 2020, a different approach to dual-screen phones but failed. While the competition has been consistent with software updates, Software updates on an LG Phone are a rarity, Additionally, a lot of experts also talk about lack of marketing in comparison to the Chinese mobile phone makers to be a reason for declining market share.
Do you own an LG Device? Well, fret not! The company has said in a statement – “LG will provide service support and software updates for customers of existing mobile products for a period of time which will vary by region.”
Moving forward, LG will continue to leverage its mobile expertise and develop mobility-related technologies such as 6G to help further strengthen competitiveness in other business areas. Core technologies developed during the two decades of LG’s mobile business operations will also be retained and applied to existing and future products.
The wind-down of the mobile phone business is expected to be completed by July 31 although the inventory of some existing models may still be available after that.
