LG sells 1m flagship Optimus G smartphones, is miles behind big rivals

LG’s flagship Optimus G, the smartphone that runs on Qualcomm Inc.’s Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, has sold more than one-million units since its release four months ago, reports Yonhap News. Sales started in Korea in September 2012, before moving to the rest of the world in October.

While this is a good and fairly solid performance for LG, it is also quite revealing of how distantly far behind the rest of the world’s mobile manufacturers are against the big guys, Samsung and Apple. The Galaxy S III, for instance, sold 10-million units in less than two months and has achieved more than 40-million sales since May 2012, about as much as LG achieved for all of its handsets. The iPhone 5 sold more than five million units three days after launch and two million units in its first weekend in China.

LG though is upbeat, maybe more hopeful, about growth for the future, projecting sales of 45-million smartphones for 2013. With the time it took for the Optimus G, one of two flagship models released so far, to achieve one million sales, that might be a bridge too far. Coupling this with the recent delay of Nexus 4 shipments, and it is starting to sound more like a pretty picture being painted than reality. The Nexus 4 is primarily the same phone as the LG Optimus G, albeit in a different package.

Yet LG does seem to have a bit of a plan up its sleeve, with the plans of getting into the Windows Phone 8 game. As a senior executive from one of LG’s partners told The Korea Times: “We will release quite a number of new Optimus devices this year, and LG also has some new smartphones in the works that will run Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8.” It probably still wont be enough, but hopefully getting another player in the market is never a bad thing.

Image: Geeksuper