LG Viewty racking up Euro sales

LG Electronics Co. Ltd. announced recently that the company’s new Viewty handset has sold more than 310,000 units over its first five weeks in the European market, where it is on sale in 14 countries.
The phone with a 5-megapixel camera launched in late October.
LG’s announcement is interesting in part because handset vendors typically don’t release sales numbers, except if there’s really good news.
That maxim, obviously, has been discarded by ambitious Apple Inc., which set and met sales goals for its iPhone. (Apple shot for one million units in its first quarter on the market and exceeded that goal.)
In the wake of Apple’s well-publicized success, LG-often the model of South Korean reticence-has taken a page from the American juggernaut’s marketing playbook. The Korean handset maker even did the math for anyone who would listen, explaining that around 6,300 units were sold per day across Europe. That rate exceeded previous sales records set by the company’s Chocolate and Shine models. The news got wide play in the wireless press.
In the wake of the iPhone’s launch in June, Verizon Wireless had announced in September that in the 12 months the Chocolate had been on sale in the United States it had sold more than 3.4 million units-an obvious coattail comparison to the one million-per-quarter metric set by the iPhone.
The Viewty, aka model LG-KU990, possesses “an astounding blend of technology and features,” according to LG, which include the camera features, a three-inch touchscreen and high-speed video recording. The quad-band device supports HSDPA (define) networks.
LG’s Skott Ahn, president and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Co., said the Viewty’s sales trajectory was important because it is the first product in a forthcoming “high technology” line of handsets.
LG remains in fifth place in global handset vendor rankings but clearly has dual ambitions to focus on the high-end, rich-margin smartphone market as well as expanding its volume shipments in emerging markets.