LG has made some pretty impressive strides in a cellphone market during these last few years. With the demise of Motorola and the problems ailing Sony Ericsson last year, they’ve even managed to become #3 cellphone maker in the world.
And LG does not plan to stop here. In an interview to Yonhap News Agency, Ahn Seung-kwon, president for LG’s mobile business, said that they plan to become #2 cellphone maker in the world by 2012. Which means that they plan to overtake Samsung in the next 3 years.

There were also some other interesting tidbits that Mr. Ahn let drop during the interview. Among them are:

* in Q4 LG will launch a new “Black label” series phone, which will be positioned to compete with the iPhone
* LG is pretty happy with their luxury “Prada” phone line and is working on another Prada handset
* LG also has a plan to move even deeper into a luxury cellphone market, by creating it’s own extreme premium brand,  “similar to Toyota’s Lexus and Nokia’s Vertu”

Will LG succeed to get to a #2 spot in worldwide cellphone vendor rankings? Unless Samsung or Nokia screws up in some major way, I strongly doubt that.

On the other hand, #3 spot is LG’s to keep now. They seem to have a pretty strong product line-up, smart business strategy and keep executing on it very well. While LG’s closest competitors – Motorola and Sony Ericsson keep sliding into irrelevance. So I expect the gap between them to widen further.