LG 2003 Annual Report Download - page 23

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LG Electronics Inc._Annual Report 2003 23
Dear Shareholders and Customers,
The year 2003 was a difficult year for business due to the war in Iraq, unstable economies in
the Middle East and South America, the rise in oil prices, and the fluctuations in the exchange
rate. In the face of such difficult circumstances, the management of the Digital Display & Media
Company sought to strengthen competitiveness and focus on profits. As a result, all of our
businesses were profitable, and the entire company posted its historical best sales and profit
figures. We can attribute such achievements to the aggressive promotion of our three guiding
principles: product leadership, market leadership, and operational excellence.
Taking a closer look at our performance by product, we start with our Digital TV (DTV)
business. Last year we unveiled the world’s first 50” High Definition (HD) PDP with built-in
tuner and developed the “XD Engine” chip using our own proprietary image-enhancing
algorithms. As for optical storage, we solidified our global leadership with the release of our
Super Multi Drive, the world’s first multi-format DVD writer that not only supports DVD+RW,
-RW but also RAM as well. In the future, we expect digital broadcasting to be a high growth
market; as such, we developed an HD level set-top box and data communications system
designed specifically for automobiles that will help us lead the promising telematics market.
Although the outlook for 2004 is positive with recovery in global IT spending expected and an
upbeat view on the US market, it is too early to be overly optimistic as consumer sentiment is
quite mercurial and the North Korean nuclear situation is unresolved. However, inspired by the
tough but successful experience of 2003, we will confront these challenges to achieve the
following management goals.
First, we will concentrate our efforts to become No.1 in Digital TVs, PDPs, and LCD monitors.
Using our core competency in digital technology, we are striving to make leading DTVs
at competitive prices by reducing costs through innovations in process
manufacturing. The PDP market is growing rapidly, and we are
determined to secure our market leadership through timely
investments to increase production capacity. Moreover, we have an
aggressive marketing strategy to promote the value of the LG brand
for DTVs, PDPs and LCD monitors in North America.
Second, we will aggressively cultivate promising businesses. Digital
broadcasting is a burgeoning market that brings together many
different technologies and services, and we believe that our highly
differentiated set-top boxes can lead this trend toward convergence.
Telematics is another area of future expansion and we are building up
Global Top 3 Display & Media Company
|||||||Digital Display & Media Company |||||||
PDA Phone
Measuring
110x58mm with only
a thickness of 24mm, our
compact PDA phone packs a
full load of features including a 1.1
megapixel camera, camcorder,
MP3/multimedia player, and a 64
poly MIDI bell.