April 27, 2024

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[THE INVESTOR] CHANGWON -- Every 11 seconds, newly assembled 24-inch heat-pump laundry dryers are wrapped in boxes and get ready for shipment at LG Electronics’ production hub in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province.
 
“Monthly production units of LG Tromm Dryer is about 40,000 this year, a 10-fold jump from a year earlier,” said a senior manager of the Factory No. 2 of the electronics provider. 

Employees assemble parts to manufacture dryers at LG Electronics’ factory for living appliances in Changwon, South Gyeongsang, on May 31. LG Electronics.

In preparation for rising demand for laundry dryers in Korea, LG, the leader in the garment care electronics market, doubled the assembly lines for dryers at the plant four years ago. 

“This plant flexibly adapts to changing market demands and adjusts to shorter or longer processing times,” the manager said. “For dryers, it’s a pretty busy season compared to a few months ago when we produced one in every 14 seconds.” 

Founded in 1987, the Changwon factory, which is 526,000 square-meters, has been the birth place of LG’s full lineup of living appliances including washing machines, dryers and clothes caring systems for the past 30 years. 

The annual capacity of the plant expanded from 500,000 units to 5 million as of today through innovative efforts to improve the productivity, according to the official. 

The latest premium Tromm Twin Wash model for exports is also being manufactured here. 

This year, LG, also the G6 smartphone provider, aims to beef up global presence of the Tromm brand, a proper noun for the company’s garment-related home appliances. 

“LG has been making the history of garment care systems since launching the country’s first washing machine in 1969,” said Lyu Jae-cheol, head of the living appliance division at LG. “We have been eyeing on the expanding dryer market for the last 10 years, which will have a rapid growth this year.” 

Indeed, sales of LG Tromm Dryers surged 10 folds as of April compared to the same period last year. Demand is on the rise due to limited space for drying laundries under the sun at ordinary apartments that do without verandas for interior reasons, and also the growing public concerns about worsening air quality at home. 

The company forecasts the total sales units of dryers here to reach 600,000 by the end of this year.  

Sales of LG Tromm Styler, the first-ever clothes caring system in the home appliance market worldwide, shot up 109 percent year-on-year, on its path to become a must-have electronics item among fashionable Korean consumers.  

“We are seeing growing needs for clothes management in the domestic market, but global needs yet remain lackluster,” Lyu said. “Some Chinese companies are producing copycats, which is not a bad thing at all since we need to enlarge the pie in the first hand.”   

How to market the garment care system effectively in the US and European markets remains as an important task for LG, the executive added. 

“Our ultimate goal is to provide total solutions for efficient and effective clothes management step by step from washing, drying to keeping clothes tidy,” Lyu said. “In the long run, we hope to come up with a solution for folding the cleaned clothes, which we believe is the final step of clothes management.” 

By Song Su-hyun/The Korea Herald (song@heraldcorp.com)