LG Electronics Vice Chairman Cho Sung-jin revealed at CES 2018 that the company would no longer be following a regular launch cycle for its smartphones. While he didn't explicitly state it was to help reduce losses, it's more than likely a major factor since LG's mobile division has been losing money for 11 straight quarters.
Sung-jin did however say the reasons for the shake up were because the company believes "it is important to retain a good platform for a long time and concerns over the supply of lithium materials."
He added that rather than introduce an entirely new model of phone each year, the company will instead release variant models of pre existing devices. This means that while we're expecting LG to unveil the G7 sometime this year, possibly in March, we probably won't get a G8 in 2019, but instead an upgraded version of the G7.
LG's mobile division made losses of around $650m in 2016, but is expected to reduce that to around $170m in 2017 after experiencing good sales for its budget devices.
The company is however expecting to see growth in the robotics sector over the next few years, after it introduced CLOi at CES. Sung-jin admitted that LG will need acquire other smaller companies before turning its robotics division into a thriving one, but said he expects it to be making a profit in two to three years.
LG had plenty of new product announcements at CES this year, including new Gram laptops, an InstaView fridge with 29in display, new OLED and Super UHD TVs and the ThinQ smart speaker with Google Assistant built in.