LG (GoldStar) 🇰🇷

GoldStar (Geumseong) was founded in 1958 by Koo In-hwoi as the electronics branch of the Lucky chemical group, and in the sixties it introduced Korea’s firsts: the radio, the fan, the refrigerator (1965) and the black‑and‑white television (1966). In 1968 it manufactured Korea’s first air conditioner, the GA‑111 window unit, and in 1979 the GA‑100SP, its first split wall‑mount system, with the indoor unit in the wall and the compressor outside. In 1983 it introduced its first floor‑standing unit (GA‑025) and in 1982 opened a television factory in the United States. On February 28, 1995, after merging with Lucky, the company was renamed LG Electronics.

A recent anecdote sums up the reputation for robustness of those early splits: in 2024 a couple from Gyeongju donated to LG the GA-100SP they had installed in the spring of 1979, which was still working 45 years later without a single failure; the company displays it alongside the GA-111 and the GA-025 in its Inhwa Garden museum. Another has a literal shine: in 2000 LG launched the premium brand “Whisen,” and in 2005, to celebrate that it was the world’s best‑selling air‑conditioning brand, it produced 10,000 units with the six letters of the logo in solid gold; in December 2025 a viral video revealed that each logo was worth more than 700,000 won, and half of Korea started looking for old splits.

In Spain, GoldStar splits arrived in the nineties as an economical alternative to Japanese brands: they still appear in the second‑hand market, in repair forums and in spare‑part catalogues, and many are still working. After 1995 the catalogue was renamed LG, and today the brand sells in Spain from the entry‑level range “Winner” to the Artcool and Dualcool wall‑mount units and the Multi V systems, with a subsidiary that operates as LG Electronics Spain.

Pending verification

The “Winner” range has only been confirmed as a current LG line in Spain (models W09TE/W12TE), not as a range from the nineties. The year of establishment of the Spanish subsidiary nor the official arrival of the GoldStar splits has also been found.

History machine-translated from Spanish. Can you improve it? Write to us.