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Previous reports from Korea Herald suggested that the tech giant LG Electronics Inc. is considering shutting down its smartphone unit instead of selling it as the South Korean company had previously hoped. This comes after LG announced back in January that its mobile communications division was open to “all possibilities” as far as operations were concerned, ”including sale, withdrawal, and downsizing.”
“LG reportedly had talks with others over the sale of the unit but apparently there was not much progress in their negotiations,” an anonymous source from the mobile industry said for Korea Herald. “It seems that selling its entire mobile business appears to be difficult at this moment, as is the partial sale of the unit.”
Five years of misfortune and bad sales
The news comes after 5 years of LG’s smartphone business declining and sustaining losses of $4.5 billion. Rumors have also circulated about the company being in negotiations with Vingroup, a Vietnamese company focusing on technology, industry, real estate development and retail, and the German automaker Volkswagen, but have unfortunately concluded without any notable progress. And considering the recent speculation, it looks like LG’s smartphone projects, namely “Rainbow” and “Rollable,” are more than likely to soon be scrapped, especially since the company might be planning to reassign its mobile workforce to other divisions of its business.
LG is “exploring a variety of options in light of the headwinds facing our mobile business,” Michelle Leff Mermelstein, LG’s head of US Public Relations, said in an emailed statement to CNET.
The rabbit is out of the bag
Although LG denied in February that it would abandon its new LG Rollable phone, whose design has just premiered at CES 2021, it has however canceled its original plans of launching the phones in the first half of 2021, at least according to DongA Ilbo. Once a huge competitor to Apple and third in the global smartphone market, LG has now lagged far behind other competitive smartphone companies such as Xiaomi, Samsung, Apple, and Huawei, with no good tidings in sight for the near future.
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