LAS VEGAS ― An executive at LG Electronics said the company plans to record two-digit growth in home appliances this year and gain product leadership in smart appliances.

“We reached a two-digit growth rate last year and we expect to do so again this year,” said Shin Moon-bum, executive vice president of the firm’s home appliances division.

“The most important strategy that should be pursued by LG is gaining product leadership. With the design, product planning and the necessary research and development resources, we expect to get near our goal of reaching $20 billion in global sales in 2014.”

Shin’s predecessor Lee Young-ha had told the press last year that the company will strive to become the world’s No. 1 maker of refrigerators and washers. He also said it will reach for about $20 billion in sales in the global appliance industry.

In a related effort, the company was also looking at overseas markets, taking a step beyond the local market for water and air purifiers, according to Shin.

“In terms of U.S. dollars, we had a rise of 12 percent in the international home appliances market last year,” he said. “We have to see a boost of 10 percent every year in order to reach our 2014 sales goal and we project the smart appliances market to grow up to $15 billion by 2015.”

For this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, LG released eight different smart appliances in the refrigerator, dish dryer, oven, cleaner and washing machine categories.

LG’s newly introduced smart appliances, based on the Smart ThinQ technology, include a refrigerator that contains several features such as a smart manager, recipe recommendations, barcode scanning, smart shopping and a health manager.

The smart oven also comes with a recipe update and could be automatically set with a smartphone, while the smart washing machine enables smart access and a smart diagnosis gadget that detects errors using wireless networks.

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