South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) confirmed that the country’s two major electronics companies, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics agreed to drop the complaints they filed against each other over a TV advertisement.
The corporate watchdog said that it terminated the investigation into the battle after the two companies withdrew their complaints and vowed to refrain from negative marketing.
LG withdrew its complaint against Samsung on Wednesday, while Samsung also dropped its lawsuit on Thursday. According to the FTC, both tech companies reached a settlement to end the dispute.
TV Ad Dispute
In September last year, LG filed a suit against Samsung over its QLED TV advertisement, arguing that the QLED brand is “misleading.”
According to Samsung, QLED is a marketing term for its premium TVs that utilize quantum dot technology to improve display performance.
However, LG claimed that Samsung’s QLED TV is only a liquid crystal display (LCD) TV that uses a backlight panel with an additional QD sheet. Therefore, LG said that Samsung’s TV is not a “true QLED” that possess quantum-dot light-emitting diodes.
After a month, Samsung filed its complaint against LG, calling its competitor to end its negative campaign without proof.
The FTC said that both LG OLED TV and Samsung QLED TV, in general, are self-emissive TVs.
In a statement, LG said that it ended the complaint, as the condition seems to resolve itself, meaning that Samsung disclosed through its YouTube channel and website that its QLED TV product is an LCD TV utilizing a QD film and an LED backlighting.
An official from Samsung said that it withdrew the complaint against LG as it dropped its negative comments on QLED TV. Samsung added that the result indicated that using the QLED brand is of no problem.
However, the FTC advised Samsung to provide customers with a clear and direct message that QLED TVs use backlights in their commercial advertisements.
