The Mobile World Congress event is easily one of the biggest that the world of mobile electronics has to offer.
Aside from CES and similar events, MWC is where the world gets to show off advances in mobile technology that will color the year in mobile as we likely will know it. LG, meanwhile, will be at the event, but one eagerly-awaited feature won’t be: LG Pay.
Word from LG officials noted that LG was planning to delay the launch of LG Pay, because it instead wanted to focus effort on the LG G5 smartphone instead.
The G5 needed “more media attention,” the reports noted, and so LG wasn’t interested in making the press split its attention between the G5 and the mobile payment platform. LG officials also denied less-than-positive reports suggesting that the delay was related to poor support from credit card issuers in major target markets.
As it turns out, the G5 is actually important to LG’s mobile operations; as explained by LG officials, “LG can’t afford to see another failure of the G5 amid challenging market situations after its earlier V10 smartphone apparently failed to get much traction.” Given balance sheets that are looking progressively worse and a mobile market that seems to be increasingly the property of Apple and Samsung, with everyone else duking it out for “distant third,” that’s not out of line.
Of course, it’s also important to note that LG would have been a latecomer in mobile payments as well, behind once again Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, along with Android Pay and an increasing number of brands.
LG might well have done better to focus on the mobile payments section than its new smartphone; while Apple and Samsung have that market pretty much sewn up between them, Apple Pay is only about a year and a half old. There’s still plenty of room for other competitors to take ground here, and LG Pay would likely have been a continuous source of revenue, taking a slice of mobile payments made as a payment processor.
Still, LG’s made it’s choice, and a few months’ delay likely won’t hurt LG Pay all that much, particularly if it puts that card option we heard about previously to work. There’s still room in the market, and LG might be name enough to make it work.
