The company is paying a lot more to make more, but you get the point
Tomorrow marks a full year since LG Mobile officially called it quits. However you felt about its phones, the buying public wasn’t all too thrilled about them: the division had spent the previous five years losing money, quarter after quarter, and that dragged the rest of the company down on the balance sheet. Now, as the conglomerate reports second quarter earnings for 2022, LG seems eager not to look back.
The company logged the most revenue ever for a fiscal Q2 at KRW 19.2 trillion ($14.7 billion), a 15% increase from the same period in 2021. Cost rises and logistics troubles have put a damper on turnover, though, down 12% to KRW 792 billion ($607.9 million). LG’s home appliance and air solutions unit had a best-ever quarter with revenue of more than KRW 8 trillion, the first such performance from any internal division.
As with any other large corporation, not everything LG does has to be successful — back in June, it decided to close down and write off its solar panel business. For a company which has had its successes in mobile over two decades, though, it was pretty difficult to conceive that it would give the trade up all together. LG might still be doing work related to smartphones — it’s making components for them like cameras and displays, it’s selling phones on its 5G network in South Korea, and it’s working on steering development of the 6G standard — but at least it’s not necessarily losing as much money as it did when it did.
We could rehash all the reasons why LG failed so hard: the bad marketing, the bootlooping, the LG G5’s poor execution of modular accessories, and the poor software support, for starters. But I think it’s still worth remembering some of the best of what Samsung’s also-ran had to offer and to point out the good in them that we want to bring forward.
