LG is leaving the smartphone business, the company confirmed today. The decision will ‘enable the company to focus resources on growth areas such as electric vehicle parts, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence and business-to-business solutions, as well as platforms and services’, LG said in said a statement. .
Existing phones will be offered for sale, and LG says they will support its products ‘for a period that will vary by region.’ The company said nothing about possible layoffs, except that “details regarding employment at local level will be determined.” LG says it expects the business to be by the end of July this year.
Rumors have been circulating for several months about the move following the division’s huge losses over the past five years. Once considered a competitor of fellow South Korean manufacturer Samsung, LG’s recent luxury smartphones have struggled to compete, while the more affordable devices have faced stiff competition from Chinese competitors. The company said earlier that it hopes to make its smartphone division profitable in 2021.
Today’s news means that LG’s long – rolled role phone will probably never see the light of day. The last time the company showed off the device was back at this year’s virtual CES when the company insisted the device was genuine and would launch later this year.
Reports that LG has considered leaving smartphones have been around since at least the beginning of this year. Although a company spokesperson described an earlier report on the potential exit from the smartphone business as completely untrue and without merit, an LG official later confirmed that The Korea Herald that the company had to pronounce a cold judgment on the division. Potential measures could include ‘selling, withdrawing and downsizing the smartphone business’, the official said at the time.
In March, reports emerged that the company was trying to find a buyer for its smartphone business, but that talks had come to a standstill and that it could close the division. Korean outlet DongA said the company has halted development of its emerging mobile phones, and that it has suspended its planned smartphones for the first half of this year.
As it lost its share of competitors, LG has released a range of striking devices with unusual form factors. There was the LG Wing, whose main screen rotated to reveal a smaller secondary screen underneath it, or its recent dual-screen devices. LG also tried its hand at a modular smartphone with the LG G5, only to abandon the initiative a year later.
Unfortunately for LG, none of these features were useful enough to turn the phones into general hits, and meanwhile, the company’s more traditional devices lagged behind their competitors in core areas such as camera performance.
LG joins a long list of high-profile device makers to give up smartphones over the years, though many of the brands have stuck to devices made by third-party manufacturers. Nokia’s consumer-focused brand lives on devices manufactured by HMD, whereas Blackberry’s brand was initially used by TCL and is expected to return this year on a device manufactured by OnwardMobility. There’s also HTC, which still sells some weird devices, but in 2017 sold most of its IP to Google. Who’s next?