LG Electronics sees robotics as future growth driver

LG Electronics has proposed its artificial intelligence (AI) robotics business as its next growth driver, seeking to counteract a slowdown in its conventional revenue sources of TVs and home appliances.

During its fourth quarter earnings call for 2025 on Friday, LG Electronics Chief Financial Officer Kim Chang-tae said the company is seeking to create synergies between its home appliance expertise and AI humanoid robots.

“LG Electronics has been accumulating technological know-how in areas such as motors, actuators and autonomous driving in the segments of industrial robots and service robots,” he said. “As a company with a deep understanding of the home environment, we are presenting AI-powered home solutions.”

During CES 2026 earlier this month, LG Electronics presented its CLOiD home robot, which interacted with its surroundings by performing tasks such as folding towels and taking milk out of a refrigerator using its arms. In doing so, the company presented its new vision of “a zero labor home,” where robots and other appliances free users from household chores.

To realize this vision, the company said it will focus on identifying growth opportunities while making active investments in key infrastructure and product areas such as AI-based smart factories, AI data center cooling solutions and robots.

The new focus comes as the company’s conventional revenue sources like TVs and home appliances showed signs of a slowdown in their 2025 earnings.

LG Electronics reported 2.48 trillion won ($1.73 billion) in operating profit and 89.2 trillion won in sales for 2025. The operating profit plunged 27.5 percent from a year earlier, but revenue grew 1.7 percent during the same period to set a new yearly record.

In the fourth quarter, the company saw an operating loss of 109 billion won and posted 23.85 trillion won in sales.

The company attributed the slowdown to a sluggish recovery in display-based products, rising marketing costs and hundreds of billions of won of one-off expenses tied to the redundancy program it launched in the second half of the year.

The Home Appliance Solution division posted 26.13 trillion won in sales and 1.28 trillion won in operating profit last year, marking the highest revenue in the company’s history. The company said the division successfully mitigated the impact of U.S. tariffs through optimized production locations, price adjustments and cost improvements.

The Media Entertainment Solution division, which is in charge of TVs, logged disappointing results with an operating loss of 750.9 billion won. The company noted that the division was hit by delayed demand recovery and intensifying market competition, particularly from Chinese rivals.

“This year is expected to present significant challenges for our business operations, amid prolonged global economic uncertainty, a delayed recovery in demand, concerns over the impact of tariffs and mounting pressure from rising component costs,” the company said.

To contain the impact of tariffs, the company said it plans to raise the share of regional supply in North America to 60 percent this year by improving operational efficiency at its three production sites in the region.

Encouragingly, the company has seen solid results in business-to-business (B2B) segments such as automotive component and air conditioning, as well as non-hardware segments including smart TV operating systems and home appliance subscriptions.

The Vehicle Solution division posted 11.14 trillion won in sales and 559 billion won in operating profit, setting new records. The Eco Solution division, which is in charge of heating, ventilation and air conditioning, logged 9.32 trillion won in sales and 647.3 billion won in operating profit.

The combined operating profit of the two B2B divisions topped 1 trillion won for the first time. Revenue from home appliance subscription services surged 29 percent from a year earlier to nearly 2.5 trillion won.