RISING LIKE BEACONS of technology along the Han River, LG Twin Towers on Seoul’s Yeouido Island offer a good starting point for understanding South Korea’s economic transformation — and the next chapter that LG Electronics is trying to write in India.

Yeouido was once little more than a flood-prone sandbar. From the 1970s, Seoul drove the island’s transformation into a financial and business district as South Korea moved from the poverty gripping it after two wars into a technology powerhouse. Inside LG’s headquarters, the conversation increasingly turns to a country thousands of kilometres away — India.

LG no longer sees India as one of its largest consumer markets. India is set to drive LG’s next wave of growth and serve as its manufacturing base for world markets. By 2030, LG aims to double the combined revenue of India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, the emerging markets it sees as pillars of its ‘Global South’ strategy. The three gave LG combined sales revenues of 6.2 trillion won ($4.4 billion) in 2025, up more than 20% since 2023.

Lyu Jae-cheol, CEO of LG Electronics, says, “Our Indian subsidiary is progressing smoothly towards its revenue growth and profitability targets.”

His confidence is not based solely on the size of India’s consumer market. In home appliances, premium products are driving growth, while the ‘Essential Series’ — a mass-premium range of refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and microwave ovens designed for India — is performing beyond expectation, Jae-cheol says.

India’s advantage is its large population and broader consumption base. LG can sell premium products and also draw millions of first-time consumers into air-conditioners, washing machines and dishwashers.

Hong Ju Jeon, MD of LG Electronics India Ltd, says, “The demand remains mixed, but India’s long-term fundamentals are strong, supported by rising incomes, urbanisation, and increasing demand for premium and energy-efficient appliances.”

Leading the pack

LG’s aim is not just to sell more refrigerators or TVs in India than foreign rivals Samsung and Whirlpool or Indian ones such as Voltas and Bluestar. It wants India to be a consumer market, manufacturing base, export platform and product-development centre.

It has two manufacturing units: at Greater Noida and Ranjangaon, near Pune. Now LG is investing ₹5,000 crore in a new facility at Sri City in Andhra Pradesh, with capacity equal to that of its two older factories.

LG Electronics India already exports to more than 60 countries. Large refrigerators and front-load washing machines are finding markets overseas, while the ‘Essential Series’ is being exported to 22 countries. “India is one of LG’s major R&D and product development hubs for emerging markets, supported by its strong pool of high-quality talent,” Jae-cheol says.

In manufacturing, LG has created what he describes as a highly localised, end-to-end ecosystem in India, including local production of key components and a vendor base. LG has a “swing production” system connecting more than 30 manufacturing sites worldwide, switching production between locations during supply disruptions.

“With the full-scale operation of our new Sri City plant, LG will be able to respond more quickly to strong domestic demand while also enhancing India’s role as a global export hub. The new facility will further improve our operational flexibility, logistics efficiency and scaling capabilities across key markets,” Jae-cheol says.

The numbers back LG’s bet: In FY26, LG India reported a profit of ₹1,685 crore on revenue of ₹24,605 crore. In Q1FY27, revenue rose 15.5% to ₹7,233 crore, while net profit increased 27.2% to ₹653 crore Q-on-Q.

LG India successfully completed its ₹11,600-crore IPO in October 2025 and listed the shares at ₹1,710.10 on the NSE. The market valuation is ₹1.14 lakh crore. Parent LG Electronics Inc., listed on the Korea Exchange, has a valuation of ₹2.32 lakh crore (rupee equivalent to South Korean won). The Indian unit’s share of the global revenue pool is just 4%.

The Indian unit’s numbers have shown some hiccups: Ebitda fell to ₹2,408 crore in FY26, from ₹3,110 crore the previous fiscal, underlining the pressure that input costs and a changing product mix can exert even when revenue remains resilient.

For LG, the answer is not to chase volume at any cost but to defend established categories while building higher-value businesses around them.

“In our main product categories, we have strengthened differentiated offerings in the premium segment while reinforcing competitive product lineups in the volume zone, where consumer demand has become more value-oriented,” says Jae-cheol.

The idea is to compete without a price war. Premium products set it apart and give it pricing power, while LG plays the volume game to stay connected to the wider consumer base.

The strategy is increasingly extending beyond traditional appliances. Vehicle components, commercial HVAC and platform-based services are becoming larger contributors, reducing the company’s dependence on consumer categories.

“We are actively pursuing future growth opportunities in high-potential areas such as AI data centre cooling and robotics, alongside existing growth engines, including AI appliances, the webOS platform, subscription models and B2B solutions,” Jae-cheol says.

India, with its combination of scale, engineering talent and rising consumption, sits at the intersection of many of these businesses.

The technology blueprint

The scale of LG’s technological ambition becomes clearer in Magok, about 18 km from the Twin Towers. LG Sciencepark in Magok does not resemble a conventional corporate research centre. Since opening in 2018, it has developed into the LG Group’s R&D hub and one of South Korea’s largest research complexes, with more than one million square metres of floor space — equivalent to roughly 152 FIFA football grounds. Around 20,000 people from eight LG affiliates and startups work across the campus.

At the innovation gallery, LG CLOiD, a home robot, fetches milk from a refrigerator, places a croissant in an oven (but hasn’t figured out how to shut the door or retrieve the baked product), starts the washing machine, and folds and stacks the dry clothes.

CLOiD shows off LG’s ThinQ ecosystem, or what it means by a home in which appliances are no longer independent machines but components of a connected system. The refrigerator knows what it stores. The washing machine understands the load. The oven becomes part of a sequence rather than a standalone appliance. The robot is the interface between the physical home and the digital intelligence controlling it.

In the kitchen, LG’s built-in suites combine appliances and storage into a single system, while full-wall refrigerators use dedicated racks and compartments for different food categories and everyday requirements.

The appliance will not be an isolated object; it will become part of the home’s infrastructure.

India’s consumers are not following in South Korea’s footsteps: they may leapfrog from basic appliances to AI-enabled products rather than passing through every intermediate stage of technological development.

Devangshu Datta, CEO of retail consultancy firm Third Eyesight, sees the shift already taking place. “Feature-rich products have started making their way into India’s consumer electronics and home appliances market, and consumers are increasingly open to buying premium products. About six or seven years ago, when robotic vacuum cleaners entered the market, many wondered who would buy them. But consumers did,” says Datta.

Next in store

LG is preparing its Indian business for an AI-driven home through products such as washing machines with AI Wash 2.0 and ThinQ-enabled appliances. It’s about long-term transformation, not a single launch.

Ju Jeon says, “Innovations already available in India, such as washing machines with AI Wash 2.0 and ThinQ-enabled appliances, are important building blocks for this vision.”

The implications extend beyond convenience. An appliance that understands usage patterns can potentially optimise energy consumption, diagnose problems, and interact with other connected devices. Consumers still measure capacity and price, but fall for some intelligence, energy efficiency, automation, and service.

India’s premiumisation trend adds to the attraction. “As rising income, urbanisation, and home renovation drive premiumisation in India’s home appliance market, LG is well positioned to meet growing demand for intelligent home solutions,” says Ju Jeon.

He points to large-capacity and front-load washing machines, where consumers want convenience, hygiene, energy efficiency, and AI-enabled features. Yet, LG is not abandoning the mass market. The Essential Series is designed to occupy the middle ground between basic products and expensive premium offerings. That segment could prove particularly important in India, where aspiration often rises faster than purchasing power.

The same balancing act is visible in LG’s expansion beyond appliances. Air conditioning is one of the clearest opportunities. India is LG’s largest residential AC market globally by sales volume. But the commercial market remains relatively underpenetrated. AI data-centre cooling is the next market.

Globally, LG is in air and liquid cooling, including chillers, cooling distribution units and cold plates. India’s immediate focus remains residential and commercial air conditioning, but its global capability shows how the company is repositioning itself around the infrastructure needs of an increasingly digital economy.

Robotics is another emerging frontier. LG describes this broader direction as Physical AI — the convergence of AI with machines capable of sensing and acting in the physical world.

South Korea built its technology industries around engineering, manufacturing and research capabilities. India has developed a vast pool of engineers, software professionals, and technical talent. LG wants to combine both.

LG Smart Park in Changwon is an advanced home-appliance manufacturing complex that produces refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, water purifiers, and air conditioners, among others. Automation, robotics, AI and digital-twin technology are embedded into production. The refrigerator line can produce one refrigerator every 13 seconds.

Journey from Busan

Changwon, roughly 41 km by road from Busan, where LG was born as Lucky Chemical and expanded into electronics as Goldstar, demonstrates what LG’s mature manufacturing ecosystem can look like when technology and production are tightly integrated. The opportunity is large, but the pieces do not fit together automatically. LG must protect its position in established categories while investing in technologies whose commercial returns may take years to emerge. It must maintain premiumisation without pricing itself out of a market where millions of consumers are still buying their first appliance.

Input costs are another variable. Arvind Singhal, CMD of consulting firm The Knowledge Company, says the consumer electronics and home appliances sector is facing both headwinds and tailwinds in India. “Over the past year, component prices, particularly chips, have risen, putting pressure on the margins of large-screen TV manufacturers. The rise in copper prices has also affected the refrigerator and AC businesses, amid geopolitical uncertainties.”

AI and IoT are creating the tailwind by making products smarter, more energy-efficient, and capable of diagnosing problems.

While competition is intensifying, LG and Samsung have a broad-based presence across categories, “which gives them an advantage over more category-focussed players such as Daikin and Voltas,” Singhal says.

Robotics presents an even more complicated question. “Some categories, such as home robots, will take time to penetrate the Indian market because affordable domestic labour remains the preferred choice for many households.... but demand for premium products is likely to grow because India has a large absolute number of affluent households,” Singhal says.

The intelligent home will not arrive in India as a single revolution: it will happen category by category, income segment by segment, and city by city.

LG’s to-do list is long: premium appliances, mass-premium products, AI homes, HVAC, B2B solutions, subscriptions, software platforms, robotics, data-centre cooling, exports, and local product development.

The journey begins in Seoul, where the skyline records South Korea’s industrial ascent; passes through Magok, where researchers work on the next generation of technology; and reaches Changwon, where machines turn those ideas into products at speed.

The next halt: launch pad India.

(The writer was in Seoul at the invitation of LG).