LG is considering leaving the smartphone market after reporting billions of pounds in losses over the past five years.
The news comes from a memo CEO Kwon Bong-seok addressed to staff and published by The Korea Herald.
“Since the competition in the global market for mobile devices is getting fiercer, it is about time for LG to make a cold judgment and the best choice”, an LG official told the publication.
“The company is considering all possible measures, including sale, withdrawal and downsizing of the smartphone business”.
The memo reassured workers that their jobs would be safe “regardless of any change in the direction of the smartphone business operation”.
According to The Korea Herald, 60% of the staff will be reassigned to other LG business units or to the company’s affiliates.
LG has been facing trouble in the smartphone market for a while now. The company has suffered losses over its phones for 23 consecutive quarters now, according to the report. This has led to a total loss of around 5 trillion won – or 3.3 billion pounds – in the last five years alone.
Despite the rough outlook, LG hasn’t stopped trying to entice smartphone buyers with its innovative new designs.
Just last week, LG unveiled the LG Rollable at CES 2021.
The device stands out from all of the expanding displays we’ve seen over the past few years. Rather than employ a folding mechanism as seen in phones like the Galaxy Fold, LG has seemingly taken the rolling tech found in its rollable TVs and brought it to its mobile line up.
Likewise, we found the LG Wing to be one of the most interesting phones to emerge from 2020. Unfortunately, we weren’t entirely sold on the unique-looking smartphone, finding that the flip display had limited use case scenarios and that the device made too many compromises to defend its steep price tag.
We’ll have to wait to see whether LG continues to expand on its phone line up in 2021.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
