As expected, LG is exiting the mobile phones business.
LG is one of the world’s largest consumer electronics companies, but the company has had a hard time competing with major players in the smartphone space like Samsung, Huawei and Apple. While the company has made some of the most interesting smartphones in recent years, that hasn’t always (or often) led to commercial success in a competitive marketplace. So LG has announced it’s done trying to compete.
LG’s phone business had been losing money for a while – over the past six years, the phone division had an operating loss of about $4.4 billion. Recently the company has been exploring options to exit the mobile space, possibly by selling its assets to another company. But unable to find a buyer after talks with several potential suitors fell through, LG decided to just cut its losses and call it quits.
The company says that will free up resources that can be focused on “growth areas,” including smart home, connected devices, electric vehicles, and business-to-business solutions. LG says it will also leverage the technology it has developed for smartphones over the past two decades toward future products including 6G devices (for whenever that becomes a thing).
You may still be able to buy existing LG phones for the next few months – LG says the wind down of its mobile phone business is expected to be finished by July 31, but some phones may still continue to be available past that time. And LG says it will continue to offer service support and software updates for those phones for some period of time (although it’s unclear how long that period will be, and LG says it will vary by region). Just don’t expect any new phones from LG moving forward.
Among other things, that means the LG Rollable smartphone the company has been teasing will probably never see the light of day, although it’s possible LG could sell its Rollable screens to other companies interested in making their own versions.
