South Korean tech giant LG has made a number of executive changes this week, after net profits for Q3 2019 dropped more than 30%.
LG is the second largest electronics company out of South Korea behind Samsung, and besides just smartphones, it operates in a range of industries making white goods, home equipment and more.
The outgoing CEO – Jo Seong-jin – was appointed three years ago, and despite the respect he’s earned for reaching that post without a college education, he failed to turn around the company’s failing smartphone division which has posted losses for 18 consecutive quarters (or four and a half years in normal person speak).
In addition to the CEO being replaced – by Brian Kwon – the company’s Chief Financial Officer is also out, and there’s a new Chief Strategy Officer appointed as well.
LG insists the transition was an amicable one, reports The Economic Times, with the company releasing a picture of the outgoing CEO Jo and incoming CEO Kwon hugging and smiling.
It’s clear that LG needs new leadership if it wants to turn its smartphone fortunes around; the company is definitely capable of making great hardware – and its screen technology in particular is widely used by its competitors – but it’s not hardware that loses LG smartphone share. It’s the lack of vision and doing something imaginative that customers will flock to.
LG’s V50 ThinQ – shown above – was pitched as a dual-screen 5G smartphone and technically, at least, it’s a great phone with great hardware. The issue is the second screen and its implementation – as well as fairly ordinary software – which saw the phone largely slump in sales.
With a number of changes at HQ, we’re interested to see what LG does next year. MWC is only a couple of months away, and likely whatever would be released around that time is already well under development.
If there are going to be changes in product, it’s more likely we’ll see them mid year rather than at MWC, but anything could happen. We’ll know soon enough!
Hey LG, you’re going to need to actually do a few years of updates on your phones to get any customer trust back.
On a plus note my wife’s LG G6+ HK model just updated to Android 9. I knows others with a G6 and they have no updates from Android 8 yet.