In an apparent show of strong confidence in LG's ability to come out on top in the 3D TV hegemony battle, Baek Woo-hyun, chief technical officer(CTO) of LG Electronics stated, "We will raise our global market share in the 3D TV market up to 50% next year."
The 3D TV market, projected to grow rapidly, has seen Japanese companies-such as Sony and Panasonic battling for the number one market share. However, these Japanese companies lost to Korean TV makers in the flat panel TV market.
CTO Baek Woo-hyun suggested a specific goal of selling 3.4 million 3D TVs by 2011. He also, added that LG will make sure that sales of 3D TVs make up 10% of the total TV sales. According to Baek, success or failure of the 3D TV market hinges on content development. LG's partnership with SkyLife (a satellite broadcasting provider of South Korea) reflects the Korean home appliance maker's intention to boost demand for TVs by proactively developing entertaining contents for viewers.
He highly valued the growth potential of Blu-ray in the oversea market. Baek said, "Our efforts are underway to put successful Hollywood 3D movies in Blue-ray Disc. And, we are also making preparations to enable viewers to watch those Blu-ray movies on LG's 3D TVs. On top of that, LG is working agilely to respond to the launch of 3D broadcasting by overseas satellite TV operators such as DirecTV (an American direct broadcast satellite TV company) and British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB).
Baek said, "Broadband TVs, next year's strategic product targeting the North American market, have great potential to evolve into 3D TVs. Broadband TVs have a feature of instantly streaming VOD services from CinemaNow, YouTube, and etc...
He also went on to state, "At the moment, technical limits such as a server problems hinder watching Internet contents on 3D TVs, but we believe that this will change. So, in the long run, we are preparing for this market as well." He picked the European market as a major target area. In particular, having in mind that Europeans enjoy watching sports games on a giant TV screen in places like a bar, LG plans to take on B2B (Business-to-business) markets in the EU.
