LG ships 30M handsets in Q2

LG Electronics appeared to buck the second-quarter doldrums with a record net profit and an increase in mobile phone shipments. The results were much brighter than numbers from Nokia and Sony Ericsson, which each reported declining handset shipments on a year-over-year basis earlier this month.

[1]LG reported a companywide 62 percent jump in net income to $919 million, up from $565.1 million in the year-ago quarter. LG said handset sales for the quarter were $3.78 billion, up nearly 30 percent year-over year.

LG shipped 29.82 million handsets in the quarter, up 32 percent from the 22.6 million it shipped in the first quarter and up 7.8 percent from the year-ago quarter. LG's handset profit margin rose to around 11 percent, up from 6.7 percent in the first quarter, which Choi Hyun-jae, an analyst at Tong Yang Securities, told Reuters was "pretty remarkable." The company did not disclose the average selling price for its phones in the quarter.

The South Korean handset maker said demand for mid-to-high-tier phones, such as its touchscreen Cookie phone (the company recently reported selling more than 5 million units) and its phones with Qwerty keyboards, helped handset sales. The company also said that it expected the global handset market to decline 6 percent on a year-over-year basis in the third quarter, but it expected steady growth in its own business.

For more:
- see this release [2]
- see this WSJ article [3] (sub. req.)
- see this Reuters article [4]

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LG posts $148.5M loss, predicts rise in handset sales [6]
Samsung, LG compete in handset design [7]
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