The legal fight between local electronics firms Samsung and LG Electronics is getting uglier by the minute with the firms recently suing each other over fridge marketing tactics.

Samsung filed a lawsuit with Seoul Southern District Court against its rival LG last Friday, demanding 50 billion won ($45 million) in compensation for damaging its brand value.

The move came about two months after LG filed a 10-billion-won compensation suit against Samsung in January, for which the first hearing is scheduled to be held on Friday.

“It remains a question why Samsung has decided to go ahead with the suit two months after we raised one against the firm,” said Claire Jang, a spokesperson at LG. “The court also ruled that Samsung’s video posted on YouTube was inappropriate so we believe the court will come up with a proper ruling on this case as well.”

The lawsuit is only one of a number of ongoing suits between the two competitors in Korea. The firms have taken cases against each other involving organic light-emitting display technology since last year and they are also looking into possible suits over eye movement detection technologies on handsets such as eye scroll and eye pause.

“Believing that the video posted online previously was based on objectivity, we filed our own lawsuit because LG was launching noise marketing, and it’s also a symbolic action we staged against the firm for destroying our brand value,” said Samsung spokesman Lee Seung-jun.

Samsung posted an online video advert on Aug. 22 last year that compared the capacity of the two companies’ refrigerators, but used a method that had not been standardized.

Following the ad, LG requested in September that Samsung apologize and punish the person in charge of making the ad. However, Samsung chose to post a follow-up series to the ad instead.

LG ended up filing an injunction at a Seoul court, which ruled last November that Samsung should pull the ad.

Although the ad was taken down, LG was not satisfied with the result, claiming that the incident tainted its reputation as the ad had already been viewed 2.7 million times.

The company decided to file a lawsuit against Samsung in January of this year, seeking 10 billion won in compensation. It also posted cartoons on the Web criticizing its rival’s ads.

According to market research firm GfK, Samsung placed No. 1 last year, taking up 10.1 percent of the global market share in terms of total refrigerator sales. LG placed second with 9.8 percent, followed by Whirlpool with 5.6 percent.

By Cho Ji-hyun (sharon@heraldcorp.com)