Ryu Jae-cheol, chief executive officer of LG Electronics (066570.KS), has convened company-wide executives for a meeting aimed at shaping strategy for new businesses such as robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).
According to industry sources on the 16th, LG Electronics began its company-wide expanded management meeting that day under Ryu's direction. The expanded management meeting is a gathering where LG Electronics executives from home and abroad review business conditions and strategic direction. The meeting is held in the first and second halves of each year. Unlike regular management meetings attended mainly by domestic executives, this meeting brings together executives from both home and abroad.
The daylong meeting drew about 300 participants, including executives, overseas regional heads, and local subsidiary heads, who attended either in person or online. The executives first plan to look back on a first half that recorded the company's best-ever performance amid continued uncertainty in the business environment. In the first half, LG Electronics posted strong results and held its ground despite the "three highs" in the domestic market—high exchange rates, high prices, and high interest rates—as well as overseas geopolitical issues that dealt blows to the finished-goods industry, such as the war in the Middle East.
Based on this, the executives decided to also review this year's second-half business strategy. The meeting is understood to proceed with heads of each business division reporting their business plans, including second-half performance targets and execution measures, with Ryu providing feedback.
Over the medium to long term, measures to swiftly prepare the four future businesses—robotics, AI data centers (AIDC), smart factories (intelligent factories), and AI Home—are also expected to be discussed in a similar manner as a key agenda item. At the regular shareholders' meeting in March this year, Ryu emphasized regarding the four future businesses that they are "businesses that can create synergy with the unrivaled business capabilities LG Electronics has accumulated and that hold the potential for sizable growth, among the numerous business opportunities triggered by the expansion of AI."
As LG Electronics recently established the "Robotics Business Center," a robot business oversight unit reporting directly to Ryu, the robot business strategy is expected to be a particularly key agenda item at this meeting. LG Electronics recently began initial mass production of "Axium," an actuator (joint) that is a core robot component. It is also building a data factory to secure data for robot learning. The home robot "LG CLOiD" will also be commercialized next year.
At the expanded management meeting, a session was also arranged for each organization to share cases from the perspective of Ryu's management philosophy of "surfacing problems" and "executing to win," according to sources. The aim is to spread a culture in which members seek to solve problems together and to enhance performance. Cases in which divisions surfaced and addressed pending issues or achieved results by shifting their thinking are expected to be shared.
