Recently, reports hit the airwaves that LG no longer wants to sell its smartphone division, but to close it down. According to the latest unofficial reports, this will indeed be the case, and LG is said to officially announce its departure from the smartphone market on April 5.
In January, LG let it be known that, as far as its smartphone division is concerned, it is considering all options, including its sale. It was later revealed that the South Korean technology giant is in talks with Vietnamese conglomerate VinGroup about the sale. However, these negotiations failed, allegedly because LG asked for too high a price for the long-term loss-making division. The company was also supposed to negotiate with other "suitors" such as Google, Facebook or Volkswagen, but none of them presented LG with such an offer that would correspond to his ideas. In addition to the issue of money, negotiations with potential buyers are said to have "stuck" on the transfer of patents related to smartphone technologies that LG wanted to keep.
LG's smartphone business (more precisely, it falls under its most important division LG Electronics) currently has four thousand employees. After its closure, they should move to the home appliance division.
The smartphone division of Samsung's traditional rival in the electronics field (and previously also in the smartphone field) has been generating a continuous loss since the second quarter of 2015, which reached 5 trillion won (roughly 100 billion crowns) by the last quarter of last year. According to CounterPoint, LG shipped only 6,5 million smartphones in the third quarter of last year, and its market share was just 2%.
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