LG’s latest preliminary earnings report is out, and at a first glance, Korea’s eternal second best consumer electronics organization had a solid July – September 2017 quarter. We’re obviously not talking Samsung-rivaling profit scores here, but compared to the same timeframe last year, LG Electronics estimates operating income will rise a whopping 82 percent all in all.

Namely, it seems the hit-and-miss manufacturers of smartphones like the G5, V20, G6 and V30 are looking at a Q3 profit of KRW 516.1 billion, converting to roughly 455 million US dollars, up from 283.2 billion won between July and September 2016.

But while the company doesn’t go into detail yet regarding the quarterly performance of each business unit, local ”industry watchers” expect the mobile communications arm to generate an operating loss of KRW 213.5 billion. That equates to around $188 million right now, and it’s actually less than the whopping KRW 436.4 billion (USD 389.4 million) that LG’s smartphone division squandered during Q3 2016.

At the same time, it’s up substantially from the marginal KRW 132.4 billion (USD 117.2 million) deficit posted by the ”Mobile Communications Company” in the April – June 2017 period, which almost made it seem like the worst was finally behind LG’s long-struggling handset portfolio.

This would also be the tenth consecutive quarter of mobile losses for the producers of an insufficiently popular G6 and a promising V30 that didn’t have enough time to make a difference. Oh, well, there’s always next quarter.