LG U+, Leading the Digital Transformation of the Analog Poultry Ecosystem

Business Partnership with UniEye Established
Full-Scale Launch of Environmental and Growth DX Management, Health Anomaly Diagnosis, etc.
Targeting Release in First Half of 2024

The domestic poultry industry typically operates in a vertically integrated form, where farms enter into consignment production contracts with large distributors and supply individual animals. Farms manage multiple breeding facilities, each simultaneously raising 20,000 to 30,000 animals, but tasks such as feed management and shipment weight measurement are all performed manually by people. Distributors also find it difficult to monitor the breeding status of affiliated farms in real time, causing challenges in scheduling shipments, distribution, and quarantine management.

LG Uplus has stepped up to change this analog-style poultry ecosystem. On the 9th, it announced that it has signed a business partnership with ‘UniAI,’ which possesses AI-based smart poultry farm technology, and is officially launching its smart poultry business. UniAI is a startup that uniquely holds an AI-based smart poultry feed management solution in Korea.

Lim Jang-hyuk, Head of Corporate New Business Group at LG Uplus (right), and Baek Seung-hwan, CEO of UniAI. [Photo by LG Uplus]

The two companies carefully analyzed customer inconveniences in the poultry market and condensed their services into four main solutions. ▲Environment/Growth Management DX that digitizes on-farm data such as temperature, humidity, and number of animals ▲Health Abnormality Diagnosis that checks health by analyzing abnormal behavior of individual animals based on AI image analysis, ▲ Weight Prediction that measures the average weight of the flock, ▲ Real-time Integrated Control Service that allows distributors to efficiently manage affiliated farms. Prior to commercialization, joint verification with a major domestic distributor has been completed.

The smart poultry solution is expected to significantly contribute to alleviating labor shortages on farms and improving productivity. It can reduce the time spent managing environmental and growth data on poultry farms by approximately 20-40% compared to current levels, and improve the success rate of measuring the average shipment weight of broilers from the existing 70-80% to 95%, thereby reducing penalties due to underweight shipments.

Im Jang-hyuk, Executive Vice President and Head of the Corporate New Business Group at LG Uplus, said, “We expect that the accumulated DX know-how of LG Uplus and UniAI’s technology will create great synergy to resolve labor shortages on farms, improve productivity, and contribute to increasing farm profits. We plan to expand the market to pig and cattle farming and launch agricultural robots in the future to contribute to the development of the domestic smart farm industry.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.