LG exits Chinese smartphone market

LG has stopped selling smartphones in China. The South Korean brand says it suffers too much from competition. Not a single LG model was released on the Chinese market last year.

LG has confirmed to Sohu that it has definitively stopped developing models for the Chinese market. The last phone the manufacturer developed for China was the G5 SE, a cheaper version of its semi-modular smartphone G5.

The Chinese market has many competitors that LG does not have in other countries, such as Xiaomi, vivo and many of the lesser known Chinese competitors such as Coolpad, Meizu, Gionee and Doogee. The Chinese market, like that of Japan, is known as a difficult one, in which brands that do not come from China can hardly achieve a large market share.

The move has little impact on LG’s market share, because the brand had hardly been present in China for some time. The number of smartphones delivered decreased by 1 percent in recent months compared to the same period the year before. That’s better than the smartphone market as a whole. All manufacturers combined delivered 6 to 10 percent smartphones less than a year earlier in that period, analysts estimate.