Year end and even quarterly earnings reports are fairly bland for the most part, but do give an insight into the state of a company as well as sometimes their plans for the next year or even quarter, LG has announced their 2015 year end earnings and given us a taste of what to expect in 2016.
To start with, LG as a whole made a profit, however their mobile division actually lost money. LG shipped 15.3 million phones last quarter bringing their 2015 total to 59.7 million units – that’s a lot of phones. The company expects to see strong competition in 2016, based on potential launches from competitors.
To combat an expected increase in competition, LG has announced they plan to introduce ‘two new flagship models and a more cost-competitive value chain’.
In 2015, LG launched the G4 as a worldwide release, but kept their video focused V10 primarily for the US market, so it could be the V series we see expanded globally in 2016 as well as the G5 which is expected to be launched prior to the official kick off of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month.
Since their original LG Optimus G, which was the first in the G Series launched, LG has progressively brought the launch of the G series phone forward each year, so an early release at MWC before a late in the year (perhaps IFA) launch of a second handset would fit well with this time-frame.
The budget phone range has been where LG has done quite well historically, hitting the third spot in the Australian market with their L series phones, however we’ve seen other vendors take that place in the last couple of years. LG will apparently be focusing on the ‘more cost-competitive value chain’ so we can very likely expect good things here.
The LG G4 was very nearly our phone of the year last year, pipped at the post by a simply stunning effort all round from Huawei and Google with the Nexus 6P. If all indicators are correct though, the LG G5 could be the phone to beat. We’ll know more next month after Mobile World Congress kicks off.
