Just like other phone makers out there, LG too is feeling the effects of the global smartphone slump. As a matter of fact, the South Korean mobile giant has revealed that it has lost about $36.4 million in its mobile phone business during the last quarter of last year. Now compare that to the previous year’s numbers, wherein LG managed to post a profit in the amount of $56 million in the same period. Tough times for the company indeed, even if it did register a total shipment volume of $59.7 million units of mobile devices, a slight improvement from the 59.1 million units it shipped in 2014.
It is no secret that Samsung and Apple are the dominant players in the global smartphone industry right now, and other players like LG, alongside HTC and Motorola, are often left scrambling to get some market share. For LG, it knows what to expect for this year -- more intense price wars and even tougher competition as the industry leaders and rivals continue to vie for consumers’ attention with their upcoming new smartphone offerings.
So what is LG planning to do for the next twelve months? The company is looking to bounce back from its most recent loss by by introducing not one, but a couple of new flagship devices. For sure, one of these would be the LG G5 (rumored to sport a radical new design), the follow up to the G4 smartphone released last year. Speaking of the G4, the device was well received by both industry critics and casual mobile users, but with Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones getting the lion’s share of the attention in 2015, LG’s flagship device did not help much in propping up LG’s weakening sales figures.
Still, LG has plenty of opportunity to reverse its fortunes this year. As a matter of fact, in the upcoming Mobile World Congress 2016 to be held in the beautiful city of Barcelona in Spain on February 22 to February 25th of this year, it appears that the South Korean phone maker is cooking up something. About a couple of weeks ago, the company had already sent out a teaser invite, promising that “play” will begin a month from now.
With regards to the premium smartphone market, LG has definitely not sat idly by in the past few months. In October of last year, the South Korean mobile manufacturer unveiled the LG V10 handset. About a couple of months later, the company later revealed that it had sold 450,000 units of the V10 smartphone in the United States market. But the whole of 2016 still presents a long road for LG, and it will need to tread it carefully to come out in 2017 on the winning side.
