LG Shuts Its US Phone Business; Sells Patents To Oppo

LG seems to have lost its grip over the smartphone market in the past few years. The company faced stiff competition from Samsung and Apple, while other Chinese OEMs made things tough for LG. After struggling for a while, the company decided to call it day on its phone business a few years back.

LG was always an innovator in the smartphone business, pioneering ideas such as modular phones, rotating displays, and 3D cameras to name a few. The company also had several innovative concepts in the works, but many didn’t make it to the production stage.

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LG sells its Mobile Patents to Oppo

But this doesn’t mean that LG hasn’t made any revenue from its phone-related business. To keep a steady stream of revenue, the company keeps liquidating its mobile business by selling patents. In 2022, the company signed a patent agreement with Apple, and now the company has a new licensing deal with Oppo.

If the reports are to be believed, LG has sold 48 patents to the Chinese phone maker Oppo. Interestingly, Oppo recently settled its patent disputes with Nokia which prevented it from selling its phones across the globe for a few years. Learning from its past experiences, Oppo decided to amass several patents regardless of their cost.

According to USPTO and The Elec, the 48 patents that Oppo bought from LG pertain to codecs required for audio and video streaming signal compression. Since LG is heavily dependent on Apple and Samsung as a supplier, it would be difficult for the company to take on these phone juggernauts head-on.

This has forced the company to turn to Oppo and other Chinese phone makers to sell its patents. Oppo was reportedly ready to incur a huge price for them as it wanted to curb any potential patent disputes. Now that Oppo can sell its phones globally again, it wants to compile a host of standard patents of its own, for which it could charge a licensing fee in the coming years.

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What Did LG’s Mobile Business Fail?

LG’s poor performance in the mobile market was pretty much known to everyone for several years. Like many other Android phone makers, LG failed to turn things around. LG majorly focused on mid and high-range smartphones, two segments that became very crowded due to the rise of Chinese OEMs like Huawei, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo, and Vivo. LG failed to compete with these smartphone makers

Many smartphone makers nowadays are heavily dependent on software services such as mobile payments to churn out revenues. While LG launched a mobile payments service in 2017, the advent of Samsung Pay knocked the wind of its sails throughout its existence.