LG Electronics Inc yesterday unveiled a new range of energy-saving home appliances, as the South Korean company aims to secure a double-digit market share in Taiwan next year.
“The ‘smart home appliance range’ will meet users’ expectations, with innovative technologies and energy-saving features that maximize convenience and create greater add-on value for users,” LG Electronics Taiwan president and chief executive Kim Byung-hyung said at the launch of the firm’s new refrigerators and washing machines.
Different from existing products on the market, LG’s new flagship 826-liter refrigerator, named the GR-D82B and priced at NT$99,000 (US$3,405.57), has a smart filtering system that can filtrate nearly 100 percent of harmful bacteria and eliminate odors through four filtration processes, the company said.
LG also launched three medium-sized models of refrigerators, priced between NT$33,490 and NT$35,490, hoping the new products will boost its refrigerator market share to 10 percent next year from this year’s 7 percent, the company said.
In addition, LG yesterday unveiled a new washing machine, which is designed to wash up to 17kg of clothes per cycle, and said it expected to see its washing machine market share increase to 25 percent next year from 20 percent this year.
Moon Kyung-jin, home appliance product marketing director at LG, said all the new products will hit the market by the end of the year, and that the company will be launching a 66-liter washing machine in May next year.
LG expects to see its overall sales in Taiwan grow by 20 percent next year, mainly driven by TVs and smartphones, Kim said.
Kim forecast that the home appliance market would remain flat next year, but that demand for 47-inch screen TVs would continue to grow.
Kim said LG will ship more than 1 million TVs next year to increase its global market share to 20 percent from this year’s 10 percent, as he expects the global penetration rate of larger TV’s will hit 50 percent next year.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
AI TALENT: No financial details were released about the deal, in which top Groq executives, including its CEO, would join Nvidia to help advance the technology Nvidia Corp has agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products. The world’s largest publicly traded company has paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and is to integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the start-up’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said. Groq would continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, it said on Wednesday in a post on its Web
RESPONSE: The Japanese Ministry of Finance might have to intervene in the currency markets should the yen keep weakening toward the 160 level against the US dollar Japan’s chief currency official yesterday sent a warning on recent foreign exchange moves, after the yen weakened against the US dollar following Friday last week’s Bank of Japan (BOJ) decision. “We’re seeing one-directional, sudden moves especially after last week’s monetary policy meeting, so I’m deeply concerned,” Japanese Vice Finance Minister for International Affairs Atsushi Mimura told reporters. “We’d like to take appropriate responses against excessive moves.” The central bank on Friday raised its benchmark interest rate to the highest in 30 years, but Bank of Japan Governor Kazuo Ueda chose to keep his options open rather than bolster the yen,
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS