Unless the partnership is a takeover of B&O by LG, Tue can definitely tell LG what to do especially if its a contract manufacture. Its up to B&O to specify materials, design, quality tolerance and testing. Don't confuse B&O cost cutting with manufacturing prowess. The facts are you pay for what you get; if Tue cost cost and goes plastic its Tue fault. In Australia, the retailers often buys the cheapest quality cotton for their house brand clothing, feels horrible and thin. When I visited China I found there's a massive quality range, some are right up in the quality spectrum. Facts are lots of companies take the lazy and greedy way out find the cheapest stuff to sell - even though it doesn't cost much more to spec and use higher quality stuff.
If Korea can make computer CPU, most TV panels in the world, the largest tankers in the world, cars, memory chips, pcs, smartphones, I think its very skeptical that they can't make a simple TV. Most of those items are order of magnitude more complex than a tv.
I'm not a video electronic engineer so I'm speculating -B&O investment to move to OLED might not be as much as what Panasonic did. B&O already has a good video engine and LG already has the tech to drive the panels. Even if they had to engineer a custom chip, its actually better to do so with LG. LG is spending lots of money doing improvements to their video processing, B&O knowledge can be shared and if proven to be better LG and B&O could build/use the same processor. That's something B&O will struggle or pay a lot if it did it by itself. Look at Leica, for years it couldn't compete with the Japanese for the latest new technologies but now with Panasonic it can have 4k recording and better sensors. I have a Leica branded Panasonic compact camera, it's look and feel is all Panasonic but the colour and glass quality is definitely Leica. B&O still can keep true to its heritage: spec out its quality requirements and components, LG builds to spec (with B&O spec video processing algorithms) and ship the inner components to B&O workshops, B&O makes aluminium parts and assemble the final tv with the aluminium parts that we love. LG could even do the assembly. One things for sure LG is not a fan of built-in colour calibration, that's very unique to B&O.
As for the HP B&O branding, that's something else. B&O hardly knows anything about PCs. HP gained B&O audio knowledge and a name to replace the Beats cobranding that has been dropped. Whether this branding tarnishes B&O name we have to see how it unfolds though I suspect B&O gets paid royalties for the branding 🙂
