Wowza. After the news that LG was pushing Optimus Ones off the shelf at a rate of around a million handsets per month, I sort of just assumed they were having a good quarter, financially.
Not so much, it turns out. In fact, Q4 was pretty much their worst quarter in recent history.
As a whole, LG’s mobile communications division posted a Q4 loss of $245 million dollars — of that, the handset group made up a loss of $234 million. While they managed to get 30.6 million handsets out the door, handset sales were still down over 15% from Q4 of last year.
It makes some sense; LG’s biggest successes lately have mostly been lower-end, wallet-friendly smartphones. Things like that can’t have huge profit margins. Lets hope their shiny, high end toys coming later this year, like the Optimus 2X and Optimus 3D, can swing’em back into the positive.
Oh, and here’s a fun fact: Can you guess where LG sells the most handsets? Hint: It’s not Korea, China, Japan, or anywhere else in Asia. You ready? Coming in at 32% of LG’s handset sales: it’s North America!