BARCELONA, Spain ― LG Electronics said Monday it aimed to sell at least 40 million smartphones this year, up more than 50 percent from what it sold in 2012, as the firm strengthened its lineup.

Park Jong-seok, chief of the mobile communications unit at LG, said that it planned to sell a quarterly average of 10 million smartphones in 2013 with the launch of its four representative handset series featured at the Mobile World Congress.

The Seoul-based company sold a total of 26.3 million smartphones in 2012, according to data released by market research firm Strategy Analytics.

“It’s an issue of great interest as to when LG will go over the 10 million mark per quarter in smartphone shipments as we shipped 8.6 million smartphones in the final quarter of last year,” he said in a press conference held a day ahead of the world’s largest mobile trade show.

LG has struggled to garner a bigger stake in the global smartphone arena with the firm being a latecomer in the rapidly changing industry. It has been eager to get back in the game with the launch of its Optimus series and analysts have responded positively, especially to its fourth-quarter performance last year.

For this year’s mobile event, LG will display smartphones belonging to the G Series, F Series, L Series and Vu Series.

Led by its 5.5-inch Optimus G Pro and 4.3-inch Optimus L7 II, the company’s new lineup will focus on four major factors: design, user experience, LTE and display, said Park.

LG will also adopt the multi-operating system strategy and launch a new handset running on Mozilla’s new Firefox mobile platform within this year, said Brian Kwon, senior vice president of Product Planning Center at the firm.

Firefox takes up about one-fifth of the global Web-browsing market, following Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

“If you ask whether we’re ready to adopt a new OS other than Google’s Android, the answer would be yes,” he said. “It’s confirmed that LG is participating in the activation of a new mobile platform and it’s just a matter of what value the new OS will offer to our customers.”

Telefonica, a mobile carrier that provides service in 25 countries, also announced on Monday that the first Firefox OS gadgets would be released in Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Venezuela this year and handset manufacturers like LG, TCL and ZTE would take part in the effort.

The announcement took place shortly ahead of its competitor Samsung Electronics and Intel’s presentation of the upcoming Tizen OS in Barcelona on Tuesday.

In the meantime, LG also said it was considering when to launch its tablet PCs, which will most likely happen this year.

By Cho Ji-hyun, Korea Herald correspondent
(sharon@heraldcorp.com)