LG Electronics said on the 1st that it will support partner companies in securing manufacturing competitiveness by using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twin technologies. A digital twin is a technology that precisely reproduces a real space in a virtual environment. When an actual factory is implemented in a digital space, analysis through AI and big data becomes easier, allowing companies to find ways to improve operational efficiency.
LG Electronics recently visited its Pune, India, plant with 11 partner company CEOs. They toured a local partner's production site that boosted productivity with automation equipment, and shared each company's know-how and improvement cases in building smart processes.
At this event, a domestic partner supplying air-conditioner parts was introduced as a best practice. According to LG Electronics, by automating a manual process that had large variations depending on workers' skill and know-how, productivity more than doubled and the defect rate fell by more than 75%. By digitizing the production process, the status of various pieces of equipment in operation can also be monitored in real time. As a result, the response time to abnormalities was reduced by 67% compared with before.
A domestic partner that supplies refrigerator parts built a "smart composite painting line DX (digital transformation) system" to digitize the painting process. By introducing an AI-based vision inspection system, it shifted from workers manually sorting product colors to managing production status based on DX technology, cutting the time required by 75%. The system also made it possible to detect minute defects that were hard to spot with the naked eye, reducing painting defects by about 70%.
An LG Electronics official said, "We organized this event to raise manufacturing competitiveness across the board through mutual benchmarking among domestic and overseas partners," adding, "Following the Pune, India, plant, we plan to visit major overseas production subsidiaries in China, Vietnam and Indonesia."
In Mar., LG Electronics invited partners to AWE 2026, an appliance exhibition held in Shanghai, China, so they could directly check the latest manufacturing ecosystem and technology trends. In Feb., at LG Smart Park in Changwon, South Gyeongsang, the company held the "2026 Partners' Association regular general meeting" with 83 partners to discuss future preparedness and sustainable growth. The Partners' Association is a voluntary consultative body established to promote shared growth between LG Electronics and its partners. Since 2013, it has held regular general meetings and workshops in the first and second halves of each year to share goals and results and reaffirm the commitment to mutual growth.
LG Electronics is operating a "shared-growth smart factory support program" that helps improve partners' work productivity based on smart factory technologies it has secured in large numbers, such as physical AI and big data. Since 2019, more than 250 partners have received shared-growth smart factory support from LG Electronics.
LG Electronics is operating a 300 billion won shared growth cooperation fund and an ESG fund to support partner financing. In particular, starting this year, it plans to expand the annual interest-free funding for partners' investments in new and automated equipment from about 40 billion won to 60 billion won to help them secure technological competitiveness.
Lee Jae-hyun, head of LG Electronics' Global Operation Center, said, "Enhancing partners' competitiveness is the core of shared growth," adding, "We will continue efforts to help partners directly check and benchmark the global manufacturing ecosystem and technology trends and strengthen their manufacturing competitiveness."