Is now a good time to buy an LG TV?

Is now a good time to buy an LG TV?

I’ve heard plenty of people say “Now is a good time to buy an LG TV” (https://www.reddit.com/r/GamersNexus/comments/1ws0fwc/lg_is_trying_to_winover_customers_by_lowering/)

The follow up always seems to be:

• Buy it
• Don’t connect to internet
• Jailbreak it

I’m not fully sure why their suggestion of “now” is good… perhaps because they suspect the backlash will drop sales and cause a price increase?

One theory I had was following Sony’s way of working, which may come to an end.

Sony

Sony has historically sold the Playstation loss, as well as Microsoft

Without digging in too deep, it’s simply because they recouperate costs on sales of games and with high margins and based on the predicted per-customer sales, this presumably works.

And, of course, with a subsidised cost means they can try to win over competitors to get their console more households.

LG

So, my initial thought was perhaps LG was doing the same thing - subsidising the cost of TVs and making back the loss (or loss of profit) via advertising. Of course, they may not subsidise it at all and simply be making additional profit, but if their goal is to have a good user-case to enable their own advertising market, subsidising the cost to a more competitive rate that their competitors couldn’t accomplish would make sense.

Looking at LG’s historical finances, we can see that they made KRW 1T in revenue through advertising:

The LG Home Entertainment Company reported a revenue of KRW 15.23 trillion ($16.8 billion AUD)* and an operating profit of KRW 315.9 billion ($348.4 million AUD)* in 2024. Sales of OLED TVs saw growth in regions such as Europe and Asia, driven by global sports events. Additionally, the webOS-based advertising and content business surpassed KRW 1 trillion ($1.1 billion AUD)* in annual revenue.

This equates to approximately 7% of their LG Home Entertainment income.

This means if they’re bringing in 15T from sales of TVs and 1T from advertising, they would only be able to subsidise their TVs by 6.67%.

Given this, and the fact that LG Home Entertainment sells devices other than TVs, the actual contribution from advertising to television revenue is likely lower than this figure.

Even if we assume that LG passes all of its webOS advertising and content revenue back to customers through cheaper hardware, we’re looking at an upper bound of approximately 6.6% relative to the division’s reported revenue (and likely less for televisions specifically).

Of course, this assumes all advertising and content revenue is available to subsidise hardware, ignoring the costs of running the platform and the possibility that LG simply retains the additional profit.

Is it worth it?

Assuming that LG aren’t subsidising further to increase market share and these figures show a sustainable figures, then we can assume that the savings being had are no more than ~5%. With an average LG TV (latest generation etc) of about £1000 (personally I buy older generations at about £400), then the saving would be only up to ~£50 (but could also be £0).

So, is it worth it to buy a TV that I know will spy on my and either cripple it’s features or attempt to root it/replace the OS (which could just brick it entirely) just to save £50… No, not for me.