As usual, it doesn’t look good for the LG segment. As I mentioned The Korea Herald, LG Electronics CEO Kwon Bong-Seok sent out a staff-level memo that the company is considering making major changes to its smartphone division, including the possibility of leaving the smartphone business.

Last week, the Korean news outlet To you He also wrote about this note in a now deleted post. Post deleted because LG Expose her brutally The report, describing it as „completely false and unfounded.” This week, LG is basically confirming the same note report from the Korea Herald, complete with comments from LG. the edge I also got a crush on LG about the report.

„As competition in the global mobile device market is getting fierce, it is time for LG to make a cold judgment and the best choice,” an LG official told the Korea Herald. „The company is looking into all possible measures, including selling, withdrawing and downsizing the smartphone business.”

LG’s smartphone business has been struggling for a while. As the report notes, LG’s smartphone division has lost about 5 trillion won ($ 4.5 billion) over the past five years. The official earnings account is divided by 22 in a row Losing quarters. Today you won’t find LG on ‘Global smartphone market shareScheme; instead, it would be buried in the category of “other.” In the United States, the interview LG has 13 percent of the market, mostly due to prepaid sales.

The CEO of LG Electronics held this position only 13 months ago and has undoubtedly rated LG’s only division losing money over the past year. at Interview In January 2020, shortly after his appointment as CEO, Kwon promised that „LG Electronics’ mobile business will be profitable by 2021.” It remains unclear if this is a reasonable goal for the company.

The original TheElec scoop has been backed up and translated Here. You should definitely take the matter with caution because the port deleted the post and didn’t get behind it, but so far, it seems to be correct. It contains interesting information not included in the other report: LG will announce a trend for its mobile unit on January 26th. TheElec also claimed that LG sent a directive to „stop all developments except for Project i”, with „i Project” being the codename for LG’s flexible screen. LG is rollable smart phone. The last part of the report seems extremely plausible in increasing the likelihood that the LG brand will never leave the smartphone market and instead will bundle the logo on several white flags. ODM companies.

Why would anyone buy an LG phone?

LG has never had a strong sales space for the smartphone wars. At the end of the market, LG always looks like To be overwhelmed Its biggest Korean competitor, Samsung. It shipped high-spec phones with heavy Android skins and a bad update plan, and when Samsung introduces the same thing with greater brand recognition, why would anyone choose LG? At the lower end of the market, especially in the United States, the company owns it Shovel reliably Anonymous cheap phones in carrier stores and prepaid marketplaces. This is something to do, but again, there’s nothing here that will make LG stand out from the crowd.

If anything, LG has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to building smartphones. The company’s phones are notorious for dying early and entering „boot loops,” an unusable Android failure condition where the phone frequently reboots due to a bad flash memory. LG Was being sued Most of the boot episodes in 2017, with the suit naming every high-end LG device released in 2015 and 2016. LG ended up. I know I’ve personally put together four LG Google Nexus 5Xs for relief from boot loop issues.

When the company wasn’t on the same path as Samsung, it was cycling silly tricks that would be forgotten a year or two later: There was LG G5 With its standard accessories, such as A. Clip on camera grip; Inexplicably a banana LG G Flex; An obsession with different „dual screen” designs like the LG V10’s Show notification, LG V50’s Buckle on the second screenAnd LG Wing’s T-shaped design. You could see the company trying to do something different to stand out, but none of these ideas were like that HassanOr at least not successful with consumers.