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The LG Velvet is the closest thing to LG to a normal flagship now. With just a non-flagship SoC from the Snapdragon 765G, the company chose to exit the flagship market.
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One of LG’s many “gimmick phones”, the LG Wing takes the Velvet and adds a crazy swivel screen.
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The next trick of the LG phone is this “LG Rollable”.
LG / Ron Amadeo
As usual, things don’t look good for LG’s phone division. As reported by The Korea Herald, LG Electronics CEO Kwon Bong-Seok sent a memo to the entire team saying that the company was considering making major changes to its smartphone division, including the possibility of closing the smartphone business.
Last week, Korean news agency TheElec also wrote about this memo in a deleted post. The post was deleted because LG brutally unmasked the report, calling it “completely false and without merit”. This week, LG is basically confirming the same report from the Korea Herald, complete with comments from LG. The Verge also received approval from LG on the report.
“As competition in the global mobile device market is getting tougher, it is time for LG to make a cold judgment and the best choice,” an LG official told the Korea Herald. “The company is considering all possible measures, including selling, withdrawing and reducing the size of the smartphone business.”
LG’s smartphone business has been suffering for some time. As the report points out, LG’s smartphone division has lost about 5 trillion won ($ 4.5 billion) in the past five years. The official earnings count shows the division into 22 consecutive quarters of financial losses. Today you will not find LG on a “global smartphone market share” chart; instead, it will be buried in the “other” category. In the US, Counterpoint has LG with 13 percent of the market, mainly due to prepaid sales.
The CEO of LG Electronics won the job just 13 months ago and has undoubtedly assessed LG’s only division with a financial loss last year. In an interview in January 2020, shortly after being named CEO, Kwon promised that “LG Electronics’ mobile business will be profitable by 2021.” It is not yet clear whether this is considered a reasonable goal for the company.
The original hole from TheElec is copied and translated on here. You should definitely accept it with a grain of salt, since the outlet deleted the post and is not after it, but so far, it seems to be correct. It contains an interesting rumor that is not in the other report: that LG will announce a direction for its mobile unit on January 26. TheElec also stated that LG sent a directive to “stop all developments, except for project i,” with “project i” being a code name for LG’s LG Rollable smartphone with flexible screen. The last part of the report seems very plausible in raising the possibility that the LG brand will never really leave the smartphone market and instead will distribute the logo to several white label ODM companies.
Why would anyone buy an LG phone?
LG has never had a solid sales pitch for the smartphone war. In the high end of the market, LG has always seemed overshadowed by its biggest Korean rival, Samsung. He sold high-spec phones with heavy skins for Android and a poor update plan, and when Samsung offers the same thing with greater brand recognition, why would anyone choose LG? In the lower segment of the market, especially in the United States, the company has reliably placed cheap, anonymous phones in operator stores and the prepaid market. This is something that needs to be done, but again, there is nothing here that makes LG stand out from the crowd.
At the very least, LG has a bad reputation when it comes to building smartphones. The company’s phones are known to die early and go into “boot loop”, an unusable Android failure state in which the phone repeatedly restarts due to bad flash memory. LG was sued for startup loops in 2017, with the lawsuit naming all high-profile LG devices launched in 2015 and 2016. LG ended up closing a deal. I know that I personally put four Google Nexus 5X made by LG to rest on boot loop problems.
When the company was not occupying the same range as Samsung, it was launching ridiculous tricks that would be forgotten a year or two later: there was the LG G5 with its modular accessories, like a clip camera strap; the inexplicably banana-shaped LG G Flex; and an obsession with several “dual screen” designs, such as the LG V10 notification screen, the second docking screen of the LG V50 and the “T” design of the LG Wing. You can see the company trying to do something different to stand out, but none of those ideas were Good, or at least they were not a success among consumers.