Hwang Hyun-sik, president of the Consumer Business Division to be appointed as the new CEO of LG Uplus. (Photo: LG Uplus)

LG Uplus conducted a personnel reshuffle of its executives in a board meeting on Nov. 25. Ha Hyun-hwoi, vice chairman and CEO, will retire after his term expires.

As a result, Hwang Hyun-sik, president of the Consumer Business Division, was recommended to be the new CEO.

At the board meeting, Hwang was tapped to be the new CEO. The board believed Hwang would be able to successfully complete a digital transformation while stably leading the organization in a rapidly changing telecommunication and media market.

Hwang will have to be appointed CEO at a board meeting and general shareholder meeting next year.

Following the personnel reshuffle, LG Uplus reorganized one business, creating six business divisions from four divisions.

Hwang is the first CEO that has built his career at LG Uplus only. He has rich telecommunication business experience and distinguishes himself from others with gentle leadership.

The top management of the LG Group has strong trust in Hwang. Hwang joined the company in 1999 and served as head of Gangnam Business Department and sales strategy manager and experienced B2C sales and sales strategies.

In the executive shakeup, Hwang became the only one to be promoted to president at LG Group in recognition of his success in leading LG Uplus’ mobile business despite the rapidly changing market environment in 2019.

Since the start of this year, Hwang has been evaluated to be leading LG Uplus’ wired and wireless businesses by excellently heading up the Consumer Business Division which integrates smart home services such as mobile, IP TV and internet services.

“Now is the time to bring innovation to our current businesses and find future growth engines in the face of rapid changes in consumer trends worldwide,” an LG Uplus official said.

“Just as LG Uplus established a nationwide network for the first time in the industry and narrowed the gap with its competitors when entering the 4G LTE era, the board appointed Hwang, a communications expert, as CEO.”

LG Uplus will set up a new business promotion department by uniting scattered business units about smart health, security, education, advertising, contents, and data, among others.

The move is aimed at creating a solid business structure in which members of LG Uplus can further strengthen their expertise to discover new growth opportunities and steadily generate profits.

In order to accurately identify and improve customers' pain points and quickly apply them in their business development, LG Uplus will establish a customer service/quality innovation center that integrates quality organizations, home service/AS-related organizations, customer centers directly under the CEO.

LG Uplus explained that the moves were made based on the new CEO Hwang’s vision to find future growth engines in new business areas and focus on improving services and quality for customers as a top priority for the two newly established units.

The Consumer Business Unit under the Consumer Business Division will eliminate the distinction between mobile and home business organizations and be reorganized into a media content business group.

The media contents business group will generate more business synergies by consolidating its business with media contents as the center.

This change aims to put differentiated contents onto LG Uplus platforms and continuously provide better services and new experiences to customers.

Various global over-the-top (OTT) service operators are expected to make a foray into the Korean market in addition to Netflix which already entered the Korean market.

As additional business opportunities, such as the expansion of 5G service diffusion and government-led New Deal projects, are expected to expand, the corporate sector plans to establish a dedicated organization under the new business group to actively respond to them and induce growth in new 5G business.

The FC Business Division in charge of service technology development will become the technology segment to strengthen its technology development function for all of LG Uplus products and services, and focus on its role in exploring future technology, including digital transformation (DX), and discovering technology-based business seeds.