LG Electronics has shipped a record amount of smartphones in the second quarter of this year to step closer to its goal of rejoining the ranks of top-tier phone makers, sources said on Monday.

The world’s third-largest handset maker showed a 590 percent increase in its shipment of smartphones in the second quarter of this year, which was five times more than the same period last year, according to Strategy Analytics, a global market research institution.

The quarterly shipment also surpassed LG Electronics’ shipment for the whole of 2010.

In terms of sales, the Seoul-based company sold 6.2 million smartphone handsets in the second quarter.

LG’s smartphones still accounted for only 6 percent of the global markets, but the company has been showing steady growth in sales and shipment on the back of a diversified lineup of smartphones including its latest brainchild, the Optimus 3-D that became the first smartphone here to showcase 3-D features. The company on Monday said it sold more than 120,000 Optimus 3-D handsets in August, just a month since it launched the phones.

As of July, LG said its domestic mobile phone market share reached 20 percent.

The embattled electronics firm had signaled a turnaround earlier this year with better-than-expected quarterly performance.

It posted a second consecutive quarter of operating profit that reached 158.2 billion won ($145.8 million), up 20.9 percent from the previous quarter, while sales stood at 14.4 trillion won ($13.3 billion) to rise 9.3 percent.

The company’s mobile communications unit logged 3.24 trillion won of sales and an operating deficit of 53.9 billion won, with handset sales reaching 3.2 trillion won. Operating deficit was pared down to 54.7 billion won from the 101.1 recorded in the previous quarter.

By Kim Ji-hyun  (jemmie@heraldcorp.com)