South Korean consumer electronics giant LG Electronics Inc. said Wednesday its first-quarter earnings sank from a year earlier largely due to reduced prices and increased marketing costs.
   
Net profit reached 22 billion won (US$19.6 million) in the January-March period on a consolidated basis, compared with a profit of 248 billion won a year earlier, LG Electronics said in a regulatory filing.
   
Revenue slipped 6.8 percent on-year to 14.1 trillion won over the cited period, while operating profit declined 13 percent to 349 billion won in the cited period.
   
From the previous quarter, however, LG Electronics returned to the black. Its first-quarter operating income nearly doubled from the previous quarter, but sales slipped 4.7 percent on-quarter in the January-March period.
   
LG, a latecomer to the smartphone sector compared with bigger rivals Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc., has been struggling to reclaim its mobile foothold.
   
But its efforts seem to be paying off. The company's mobile communications unit, which covers handset sales, had been in the red for the past years due to increased marketing costs and growing competition from low-end handset makers.
   
Its mobile communications business logged an operating income of 133 billion won in the first quarter, after it logged an operating income in the previous quarter for the first time in three years.
   
LG Electronics said it shipped a total of 10.3 million smartphones in the first quarter, more than doubling from a year earlier, buoyed by positive responses for its Optimus smartphone line-up in the global market.
   
The figure also marked a 20-percent rise from the previous quarter. (Yonhap News)