SEOUL (Reuters) – Pasta for dinner? At a touch of a button, LG’s glossy Internet-equipped refrigerator will display a mouthwatering dish with a recipe. An automatic inventory will show what’s inside without opening the door.
It’s a fridge with a brain that can place orders to the nearest grocery store when you are running low on tomato sauce. Not only that. Its 15-inch flat door-mounted screen can turn into a television, a stereo or even a digital camera.
Once known as a peddler of cheap home appliances, South Korea’s LG Electronics Inc is reinventing itself to come up with consumer electronics that dazzle even the pickiest customers.
LG — which competes with Samsung Electronics in producing mobile phones, TVs and refrigerators — aims to beef up its brand by focusing on sales of high-tech home appliances that are also more profitable.
“It’s improving product quality and brand image and investing more,” said Oh Sung-sik, chief investment officer at Franklin Templeton Investment Trust Management, which holds LG shares. “Their market share is also growing.”
LG’s strategy has paid off. It had record earnings last year and its shares are at one-year highs after they were relisted in April 2002 as a unit of holding company LG.
The upturn in LG’s mainstay appliance business — which made up 32 percent of revenues but 59 percent of profits last year– comes at an auspicious time. LG’s other businesses — digital TV, computer monitors and mobile phones — are facing increased competition and falling prices.
Full story from Reuters News Service here
