Business
15:14, 06-Feb-2018
LG exits China’s smartphone market amid rivalry from local brands
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LG officially confirmed it has quit the Chinese smartphone market where the mobile division has suffered great losses, due to fierce rivalry from local brands, such as Huawei, OPPO, vivo and Xiaomi.
“LG mobile phone business has quit China,” said the company’s representative at its Beijing office, according to Chinese news network Sohu.
The company’s smartphone unit has suffered years of losses, and ended the fourth quarter of 2017 with an operating loss of about 192 million US dollars.
The company did acknowledge at the end of January that its smartphone business faced a “challenging marketplace and strong competition from Chinese brands,” as one of the reasons for the losses.
Data from Strategy Analytics showed that LG’s mobile unit only held 0.1 percent of market share in China.
On the contrary, home-made mobile phones have become increasingly strong in the market due to their good performance and relatively low prices. In 2017, Chinese brands dominated the domestic market, according to data released by the international investigation agency GFK.
LG did not release any smartphones in China for 2017, and the last model listed on its Chinese website is the LG G5 SE, which was launched back in May of 2016.
Though LG’s smartphone business is officially over, the company will continue to sell its consumer electronics in China.