After dismal years, mobile chief upbeat for 2012


BARCELONA, Spain ― LG Electronics, which became the world’s second-largest player in the Long Term Evolution phone market last year, hopes to revive its hey-day as a hit phone maker, the company’s mobile chief said Sunday.

“2012 will be the year of LTE, HD and quad-core. Based on the growth momentum in the fourth quarter last year, we aim to become the global No. 1 in the LTE market,” Park Jong-seok, CEO of LG’s mobile communication unit said during a press conference in Barcelona, where the Mobile World Congress kicked off Monday. 

LG Electronics arrived for the mobile industry’s biggest fair with seven smartphone models to showcase, hoping to continue its recent sales momentum. With them, the company plans to enter emerging LTE markets such as Europe, Asia and the Middle East earlier than its rivals.

At the forefront of LG’s ambitious new line-up is the 5-inch Optimus Vu, which the company calls a “phablet.” The Vu attempts to combine the portability of a phone with the wider display of a tablet PC.

It comes with a stylus, hinting at direct competition with Samsung’s Galaxy Note. Unlike the Note, the Optimus Vu allows note-taking in any mode, and the display also responds to fingers and other powered-pens.

Another distinctive feature is its rare 4:3 screen ratio that mimics PCs and Apple’s iPad, especially optimized for reading.

Park saw full market potential for smartphones with a wider screen, but was a little cautious about the exact timing.

“Of the 10 million LTE phones this year, the market for the 5-inch screen is expected to hover at 20 to 30 percent,” he said.

“Some people could dislike the bigger size. But I think our hands seem to adapt to the size as fast as our eyes do,” Park said.

In Korea, where LTE filtration is fast increasing, LTE phones could make up more than 70 percent of the total phone market by the third quarter this year, the company said.

The company explained that Korea had entered the “second generation of LTE,” in which early adopters had already purchased an LTE phone, while those remaining were delaying their purchases to adopt a new one.

In order to meet the segmented consumer demands for sales growth, the company plans to announce three LTE phone models within the first half, including the successor to the bestselling Optimus LTE.

“We aim to sell 35 million handsets this year, of them more than 8 million will be LTE phones. We will dominate more than 20 percent of the market share this year,” Park said.

LG said on Monday it also plans to launch its first quad-core smartphone Optimus 4X HD in Europe as early as in April, earlier than other competitors Samsung and HTC.

The four CPUs offer console-quality video gaming and PC-like performance, while a companion core, also called “shadow core,” supports other casual activities to relieve the battery burden.

By Lee Ji-yoon, Korea Herald correspondent
(jylee@heraldcorp.com)