LG Elec sees unlikely handset sales extension in 2009 Phones.

SEOUL (Reuters) - LG Electronics expects to win svelte vegetation in handset sales in 2009 but aims to boost its wide-ranging market share amongst the ongoing economic downturn, a older executive said on Wednesday. "The tread of growth is set to slow noticeably," said Skott Ahn, president and himself top dog of LG's mechanical communications unit, adding LG's typical handset growth scale of around 30 percent in previous years would old-fogeyish to only a "slight" growth in 2009. "The expectation for next year is changing constantly.

" Ahn was speaking at a scuttlebutt symposium marking the domestic establish of a new touch screen mannequin featuring the Frankin Planner while management system. Handset makers had remained rather unscathed by the worldwide economic crisis so far this year, but a immovable warning issued by world handset boss Nokia in Mid-November, following those by Qualcomm and Intel, have signaled hasty weakening of consumer electronics demand. Nokia on Nov. 14 said handset bazaar volumes and the overall telecommunications materiel peddle were expected to decay next year.

Research train Gartner said in the end week that mobile phone sales were set to dropping up to 4 percent in 2009 from this year as the cost-effective slowdown hurts consumer requirement across the world. On Wednesday, Ahn said LG, the world's fifth-largest maker of handsets, would strain to appropriate the opening to invigorate its global customer base share to around 10 percent from its known 8 percent. He added that LG would not reserve in excessive worth competition but would focus instead on maintaining profits at an "appropriate" level. He declined to give the company's flexible phone gain perimeter target for next year.

LG sold 23 million phones in the third quarter, down from a performance 27.7 million in the second. It was still aiming to fulfil the 100 million phone quarry set for the year notwithstanding an increasingly challenging environment, Ahn said. "We are experiencing significant difficulties at this spell of the year, but we will run to 100 million units at all cost," Ahn said.

LG's operating clear room on handsets has been steadily falling, from 15.9 percent in the victory place to the duplicate quarter's 14.4 percent and the third quarter's 11.5 percent. Shares in LG and epoch No. 2 handset maker Samsung Electronics cut 3.41 percent and 2.86 percent individually on Wednesday, trailing the wider market's 0.05 percent drop.

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