Lee Kun-hee was born on January 9, 1942, in Daegu, Japan. Park Doo-ul and Lee Byang-chul, who founded Samsung a few years ago as an exporter of fruit and dried fish. Little Lee was a high school wrestler.
Samsung first dominated consumer staples such as sugar and textiles, which war-torn Korea needed. It later expanded to insurance, shipbuilding, construction, semiconductors and more. Lee Kun-hee graduated from Waseda University in Tokyo in 1965. He then studied in a master’s program at George and Washington Washington University, but did not earn a degree.
He began his career in 1966 at the then Samsung subsidiary Tongyang Broadcasting Company. Prior to his appointment as Vice Chairman of the Samsung Group in 1979, he worked for the organization’s construction and trading company, Samsung C&T.
When he became president in 1987, he decided to plan for a distant future, even when times seemed good. But he added an overlay of existing fears and ever-present crises that have survived among Samsung brass to this day.
“We are in a very important transition,” Mr Lee said in an interview with Forbes shortly after taking charge. “Our very existence is at stake if we do not move forward with more capital- and technology-intensive industries.”
The transition he had in mind became clear in 1993 when he called the managers of Samsung Electronics at a luxury hotel in Frankfurt. For days, he lectured the officers, urging them to bury the old way of working and thinking. He said, “Change everything, except your wife and children.”
Samsung said it would focus on improving product quality rather than increasing market share. It will bring in talent from abroad, and it will require senior executives to understand foreign markets intimately and how to compete in them.
