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The company believes that the mobile-phone business will generate Bt3 billion in revenues this year, Hyun-woo (Howard) Lee, managing director of the company, said.

He added that LG has to focus on offering low-cost handsets in line with the slowing economy.

Many local handset makers have said that they have to focus more on offering affordable handsets in response to the economic slowdown.

Lee is confident that despite the hard economic time, people still want to buy new mobile phones and the low-priced devices are their first choice.

"We could not ignore the low-end market even though we have achieved high sales volume among the middle and high-end buyers," he said.

The company has targeted sales of one million handsets this year, up from 600,000 last year. It launched 11 mobile-phone models in the first half of the year and sold around 400,000 units. Lee believes that LG mobile can boost market share to 10 per cent this year from 4 per cent last year.

LG had low market share in the previous years because it focused on selling the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) mobile phones. But with the focus on CDMA and GSM mobile phones now, it believes that this can boost its market share to 10 per cent this year, Lee added.

Lee said that the LG Secret (SK750), the third model in its Black Label Series, will be their star performer this year. The new premium mobile phone will be introduced in Thailand after being formally launched in Asia at the IT fair, CommunicAsia 2008, in Singapore last Tuesday.

LG Electronics (Thailand) has targeted LG Secret's sales at 100,000 units.

The company this year spent Bt300 million on marketing, with about Bt100 million allocated for the Secret model's marketing. LG Electronics (Thailand) forecasts sales revenue from the mobile-phone business this year of Bt3 billion, up from Bt2 billion last year.