LG Chairman Kwang-mo Koo revealed’color’… The battlefield’beaten’ after AI

LG Chairman Kwang-mo Koo, who will be in office for 4 years in office next year, is attracting attention after making a decision to clearly reveal the group’s future direction before taking full-scale solo careers. In addition to the recent announcement of large-scale research and development (R&D) investments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), which has been steadily emphasized since the beginning of his inauguration, he threw another game in the automotive electric field, which has been cultivated as a future food for nearly 10 years.

According to related industry sources on the 24th, LG Electronics divided part of the green business within the automotive parts business (VS) headquarters through a public announcement on the previous day to establish a joint venture (JV) through a 51-to-49 joint venture with Magna International, the world’s third largest electronics company. Announced that it will be established. The division’s green business includes electric vehicle powertrains, inverters, and vehicle charging and driving systems.

The new joint venture has a total equity value of 925 million dollars (about 1 trillion won), of which LG Electronics will invest half. It is interpreted that after investing 1.4 trillion won in the Austrian electronics company’ZKW’, which was acquired in 2018 in order to fully enter the electric field field, it is believed to have launched another large bet on the electric equipment business.

As such, the industry believes that the intention of Chairman Kwang-mo Koo will be largely reflected in LG’s decision to spare no investment in the electronic equipment business. It is known that Koo has been particularly interested in the future food business of LG Group since he was taking business class under his father. Since the inauguration of the chairman, LG Chem’s battery business division was spun off to launch’LG Energy Solutions’, and the will of Chairman Koo seems to have played a decisive role despite the accelerating pace of LG Electronics’ establishment of the Magna joint venture.

With the establishment of a joint venture with Magna, LG Electronics has an opportunity to attract customers and grow in size to achieve economies of scale in the automotive electronics business that has been around for nearly 10 years. Some say that it has prepared a bridgehead to become a global company by adding more expertise to the electric vehicle parts-related business that has been fostered within the VS business division.

There is another new growth engine that Koo, who is in his fourth year in office next year, will take shape in earnest. ‘AI’, which has been elaborated prior to the investment in the electrical equipment business, is growing into another future identity of LG.

AI is one of the areas that Koo has been paying special attention to since the beginning of his inauguration. AI, which is considered to be at the cutting edge of the IT industry, is also a field that cannot be easily conquered without the continuous investment will of top decision makers such as Koo.

Chairman Koo recently revealed once again his willingness to grow AI as the group’s future business. It announced that it will invest 200 billion won over the next three years by establishing an AI think tank,’LG AI Research.’ In particular, he declared that he would actively engage in recruiting talents in the AI ​​field, and recruited Professor Hong-rak Lee, an AI scholar from the University of Michigan, from the’Google Brain’, and even created the position of the first C-level AI scientist of the newly established AI Research Institute.