LG Elec woos US home appliance buyers with smart features

LG Electronics Inc. is ramping up efforts to attract premium home appliance buyers in North America with the "UP Kit" collection of home appliance accessories, which allow users to add new functions as they wish through a smartphone app.

The South Korean electronics company unveiled the UP Kit, a new concept home appliance, in January of this year, to enhance the usability and accessibility of its products.

It recently upgraded four types of functions for “ThinQ Up,” LG Electronics’ home connect app, for products sold in North America.

These include a “laundry care after finishing” feature to prevent laundry from getting tangled by rotating the washing machine periodically after the wash is finished.

The "purified water dispensing” function was introduced to dispense a pre-specified amount of water from the refrigerator water purifier.

Next month, LG will unveil new recipes for oven-baked meals. It will continue to develop new features for its home appliances targeting North America-based customers.

Those functions reflect customers’ suggestions after it gathered more than 500 pieces of feedback since the launch of the UP Kit home appliances in North America last April.

Another new UP Kit function programs the washing time considering different electricity rates between day and night, so washers can automatically operate when electricity is cheaper.

In the US, electricity is expensive during the day and cheap at night.

LG may also develop a new home appliance function to address frequent power outages in the US.

Some American customers complained that the clock in their home appliances resets when the product loses power and so they have to restart it.

A total of 21 features have been upgraded for six types of LG’s home appliance products. More than half of North American customers using the LG ThinQ app have downloaded the features.

Write to Ye-Rin Choi at rambutan@hankyung.com
 


Yeonhee Kim edited this article