LG's two letters stand for a chemical firm and GoldStar
Those two letters on televisions and washing machines worldwide are an abbreviation of two old Korean brands: Lucky, a chemical company, and GoldStar, its electronics arm. GoldStar was founded in 1958 to supply a country rebuilding after the Korean War, and it made South Korea's first homegrown radios, televisions, refrigerators and air conditioners.
The timing was fortunate. National broadcasting was just starting in South Korea, creating instant demand for sets, and GoldStar quickly built a close relationship with Japan's Hitachi. The firm listed on the stock market in 1970 and by 1976 was turning out a million televisions a year. Exports passed 100 million dollars in 1978, and in 1982 it opened its first factory abroad, in Huntsville, Alabama.
The rebrand came in the mid-1990s. GoldStar adopted the LG name and logo in 1994, and the next year merged with Lucky Chemical and a cable company, passing through Lucky-Goldstar on the way to LG Electronics. It also bought the American television maker Zenith in 1995 and produced the world's first CDMA digital mobile phones. Oddly, after a 2002 restructuring to create a holding company, the original legal entity that began as GoldStar was folded into another company and no longer exists.
Screens became its strength. LG built the first 60-inch plasma television in 1998 and formed a panel venture with Philips the next year, now LG Display, which became the world's largest LCD panel maker. Phones fared worse. The Optimus 2X of 2011 was recognised by Guinness as the first phone with a dual-core chip, but after losing 5 trillion won in 2020, LG quit phone manufacturing in April 2021.
Its expansion drew pushback in America. A planned 143-foot headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, would have poked above the tree line of the Hudson Palisades, a protected natural landmark. After an appeals court overturned approval in 2015, LG shrank the design to 64 feet. Today the company ranks second only to Samsung in televisions and employs about 83,000 people.
Source: LG Electronics
