LG Electronics
LG Electronics Inc. is a South Korean multinational major appliance and consumer electronics corporation headquartered in Yeouido-dong, Seoul, South Korea. LG Electronics is a part of LG Corporation, the fourth largest chaebol in South Korea, and often considered as the pinnacle of LG Corp with the group's chemical and battery division LG Chem. It comprises four business units: home entertainment, mobility, home appliances & air solutions, and business solutions. LG Electronics acquired Zenith in 1995 and is the largest shareholder of LG Display, the world's largest display company by revenue in 2020. LG Electronics is also the world's second largest television manufacturer behind Samsung Electronics. The company has 128 operations worldwide, employing 83,000 people.
History
1958–1960s
In 1958, LG Electronics was founded as GoldStar. It was established in the aftermath of the Korean War to provide the rebuilding nation with domestically produced consumer electronics and home appliances. The start of the country's national broadcasting that created a booming electronics market and a close relationship it quickly forged with Hitachi helped GoldStar to produce South Korea's first radios, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and air conditioners. GoldStar was the electronics division of Lak-Hui Chemical Industrial Corp. which is now LG Chem and LG Household & Health Care. GoldStar merged with Lucky Chemical and GoldStar Cable on 28 February 1995, changing the corporate name to Lucky-Goldstar and then finally to LG Electronics.1970s–1990s
Goldstar first went public in 1970; by 1976, it was producing one million televisions annually. In 1982, Goldstar opened its first overseas factory, which was based in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1994, GoldStar officially adopted the LG Electronics brand and a new corporate logo. In 1995, LG Electronics acquired the US-based TV manufacturer Zenith and absorbed it four years later. Also in that year, LG Electronics made the world's first CDMA digital mobile handsets and supplied Ameritech and GTE in the US, the LGC-330W digital cellular phone. The company was also awarded UL certification in the US. In 1998, LG developed the world's first 60-inch plasma TV and established a joint venture in 1999 with Philips LG.Philips LCD which now goes by the name LG Display. In 1999, LG Semiconductor merged with Hynix.2000s–present
LG Electronics had operated LGE.com in 2000.In order to create a holding company, the former LG Electronics was split off in 2002, with the "new" LG Electronics being spun off and the "old" LG Electronics changing its name to LG EI. It was then merged with and into LG CI in 2003, so the company that started as GoldStar does not exist.
LG Electronics plays a large role in the global consumer electronics industry; it was the second-largest LCD TV manufacturer worldwide as of 2013. By 2005, LG was a Top 100 global brand and recorded a brand growth of 14% in 2006. As of 2009, its display manufacturing affiliate, LG Display, was the world's largest LCD panel manufacturer. In 2010, LG Electronics entered the smartphone industry. LG Electronics has since continued to develop various electronic products, such as releasing the world's first 84-inch ultra-HD TV for retail sale.
On 5 December 2012, the antitrust regulators of the European Union fined LG Electronics and five other major companies for fixing prices of TV cathode-ray tubes in two cartels lasting nearly a decade.
On 11 June 2015, LG Electronics found itself in the midst of a human rights controversy when The Guardian published an article by Rosa Moreno, a former employee of an LG television assembly factory. Moreno was offered $3800 in compensation after losing both hands in an industrial accident while working for a subcontrator making parts for LG-branded flatscreen televisions.
At the end of 2016, LG Electronics merged its German branch and European headquarter together in Eschborn, a suburb of Frankfurt am Main.
In March 2017, LG Electronics was sued for its handling of hardware failures with recent smartphones such as the LG G4.
Koo Bon-joon, who was the CEO and the current vice chairman of LG Electronics, was replaced by his nephew Koo Kwang-mo in July 2018 as CEO and vice chairman. The move came after the succession of Koo Kwang-mo as the chairman of the parent company LG Corporation who succeeded his adoptive father and uncle Koo Bon-moo after Bon-moo died of a brain tumor on 20 May 2018.
LG announced in November 2018 that Hwang Jeong-hwan, who took the job as president of LG Mobile Communications in October 2017, will be replaced by Brian Kwon, who is head of LG's hugely profitable home entertainment business, from 1 December 2018. Also in 2018, LG decided to stop smartphone production in South Korea to move production to Vietnam, in order to stay competitive. LG said Vietnam provides an "abundant labor force" and that 750 workers at its South Korean handset factory would be relocated to its home appliance plant.
On 5 April 2021, LG announced its withdrawal from the phone manufacturing industry after continuous loss in the market. In 2020, LG faced a loss of 5 trillion won.
In June 2021, the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed published a video alleging an attempt by a representative of LG to manipulate the review of one of LG's gaming monitors. The representative, in an email shown in the video, attempts to influence the editorial outcome of the review by indicating testing methods and aspects of the display to be followed by the channel. This came a few months after a similar incident between the creators and Nvidia in which Nvidia warned them that if they continue emphasizing on rasterization rather than ray tracing in Nvidia's graphics cards, they would no longer receive review samples.
As of 1 December 2021, the Chief Strategy Officer William Cho will take over for Bong-seok Kwon as the CEO of LG Electronics.
In June 2022, LG acquired AppleMango, a South Korean EV charger manufacturer with a 60% purchase of the company's stocks
In that same month, the American publication Consumer Reports rated LG home appliances as the most reliable in the U.S. consumer market.
In April 2024, a security firm discovered security bugs in tens of thousands of LG smart TV models that could "let hackers hijack them". The vulnerability particularly affects smart TVs running LG's WebOS operating system from version 4 to version 7.
In December 2025, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against LG and four other smart TV manufacturers, alleging that the companies were illegally "spying on Texans by secretly recording what consumers watch in their own homes" using automated content recognition technology.
In January 2026, LG Electronics announced it would unveil an AI-powered home robot called LG CLOiD at CES 2026. The robot supports LG’s “Zero Labor Home” vision and is designed to autonomously perform household tasks, coordinate connected appliances and interact naturally with residents.
Corporate governance
Logo evolution
COVID-19 response
On 25 December 2021, LG Electronics launched a video campaign showing some of the initiatives the company has taken in India during the COVID-19 pandemic. The video shows how the company has handled the pandemic from the beginning by encouraging good hygiene practices to include social distancing, hand-washing, mask wearing, and using hand sanitizers.In a strategy to cope with demand for contactless shopping during the COVID-19 pandemic, LG Electronics has opened a number of unmanned stores that allow for customers to authenticate themselves at the main entrance, check product information, and purchase products using a mobile phone or QR code. The company operates nine unmanned stores and this will increase to 30 by the end of June 2022. These retail locations are only available in South Korea.
United States headquarters
In 2013, LG Electronics USA proposed building a new headquarters in the borough of Englewood Cliffs in Bergen County, New Jersey, including a tall building that would stand taller than the tree line of the Hudson Palisades, a US National Natural Landmark. The company proposed to build an environmentally friendly facility in Englewood Cliffs, incidental to Bergen County's per-capita leading Korean American population, having received an initially favorable legal decision concerning building height issues. The plan, while approved by the local government, met with resistance from the segments of the general public as well as government officials in New Jersey and adjacent New York. The initial court decision upholding the local government approval was overturned by a New Jersey appellate court in 2015 and LG subsequently submitted a revised, scaled-down, 64-foot building for approval by the borough of Englewood Cliffs in 2016. LG broke ground on the new US$300 million Englewood Cliffs headquarters on 7 February 2017, to be completed in late 2019.Products
LG Electronics products include televisions including hospitality televisions for hotels and commercial industrials, home theater systems, home audio, portable audio and headphones, refrigerators, washing machines, computer monitors, wearable devices, vehicle audio and displays, smart appliances and formerly smartphones and solar panels.Televisions
The LG SL9000 was one of several new Borderless HDTV's advertised for release at IFA Berlin in 2009. LG Electronics launched an OLED TV in 2013 and 65-inch and 77-inch sizes in 2014. LG Electronics introduced its first Internet TV in 2007, originally branded as "Net Cast Entertainment Access" devices. They later renamed the 2011 Internet televisions to "LG Smart TV" when more interactive television features were added, that enable the audience to receive information from the Internet while watching conventional TV programming.In November 2013, a blogger discovered that some of LG's smart TVs silently collect filenames from attached USB storage devices and program viewing data, and transmit the information to LG's servers and LG-affiliated servers. Shortly after this blog entry went live, LG disabled playback on its site of the video, explaining how its viewer analytics work, and closed the Brightcove account the video was hosted on.
LG manufactures remote control models that use Hillcrest Labs' Freespace technology to allow users to change channels using gestures and Dragon NaturallySpeaking technology for voice recognition.
As of 2014, LG is using webOS with a ribbon interface with some of its smart TVs. LG reported that in the first eight months after release, it had sold over 5 million webOS TVs.
In 2016, exclusively to India, Indian arm of South Korea's LG Electronics Inc started selling a TV that would repel mosquitoes. It uses ultrasonic waves that are silent to humans but cause mosquitoes to fly away. It was released on 16 June 2016. The technology was also used in air conditioners and washing machines. The TV is aimed for lower-income consumers living in conditions that would make them susceptible to mosquitoes.
In 2018, it was reported that LG was planning to sell big-screen televisions that could be rolled up and retract automatically with the push of a button come 2019.