LG Electronics aims to sell 6 million smartphones this year, and launch 15 Android models to help make up for its severe market lag behind key rivals like Samsung and HTC.
Some believes LG's target is ambitious - its recently announced Q2 results revealed very limited smartphone sales, and so there will be intense pressures on the second half of the year and new models planned for Android and Windows Phone 7.
An unnamed senior executive told Korea Times that LG would aim to sell 6 million high-end units this year. The vendor plans to shift its product mix away from the low-end feature phones that have boosted its volumes - but not margins – so far this year.
It will streamline this range even as it boosts its smartphone line-up, reducing the total number of phone models its sells from 145 last year to 70.
The altered mix will probably reduce the total number of handsets LG sells. In the first half of 2010 it shipped 57.7 million units, and its target for the year is 140 million. But its smartphone share is tiny and that helped put pressure on margins and deliver an operating loss in Q2.
Among the 70-strong handset portfolio, about one-third will be open OS smartphones by the end of 2010. LG will release 20 new models in this class during this year, 15 of them with Android and five with Windows Mobile or WP7.
The latter figure is lower than the dozen Windows devices LG had originally promised, though early 2011 will see it release a new series of WP7 phones plus offerings for Symbian^3 and then ^4.