New Businesses Focused
LG Group chairman Koo Bon-moo reiterated his will to restructure its business with a focus on new business in a meeting with the management of the group’s affiliates.
“Overwhelming and epoch-making changes are taking place in our business due to technological development and convergence and fierce competition,” Koo told in the March seminar for executives held in Twin Tower in Yeouido, Seoul on March 8. “We must select business items that we will focus on by taking into consideration flows of changes and our strengths and find methods to significantly enhance our business competitiveness for customers and markets.”
The seminar is held once per two or three months and consists of the chairman’s message and lectures by outside lecturers. The first seminar of this year drew all of 350 executives of the group and its subsidiaries.
Chairman Koo’s message was interpreted as putting a spur to business restructuring that values future growth engines such as auto parts, energy solutions and materials and components over anything else and the advancement of its business.
LG is concentrating on new business with LG Electronics and LG Chem as leaders. LG Chem’s secondary cell business has secured six of the world’s ten major automakers as corporate customers by way of long-term investment for about 20 years.
LG Electronics is accomplishing meaning outcomes in the new business sector. For example, its VC Business Division which absorbed V-ENS from LG CNS in 2013 went into the black in the fourth quarter of last year for the first time via the promotion of its auto parts business. Last year, LG Electronics sealed a deal to supply 11 kinds of core parts including drive motors for GM’s next-generation electric car “Chevrolet Volt EV” as a strategic partner for the automaker.
With an eye towards changing a paradigm in the next-generation display market, LG Display is also building the world’s largest OLED panel plant by investing over ten trillion won in its Paju complex for the next three years.