Samsung Rising

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS B.C. Lee in 1950. A year later he expanded to buy a Japanese-founded beer brewery, Chosun, which he later sold ...

fifty years. Mitsui, a zaibatsu, was the world’s largest private business during World War II, employing 1 million non-Japanese ...

B.C. admired the Japanese people’s resilience. Already a new generation of Japanese entrepreneurs, trained in the military and t ...

— IN SEPTEMBER 1950 UNITED Nations forces arrived and recaptured Seoul. Three months later, B.C. decided to sell off Samsung’s r ...

family, and family was company. A “Samsung Man” commanded respect in Korea as a genteel and hardworking husband. “Samsung treats ...

“The Koreans...are the cruellest, most ruthless people in the world,” James Bond’s nemesis Goldfinger says in the Ian Fleming no ...

word zaibatsu, the family conglomerates that ruled over Japanese industry in the race to World War II. As his wealth grew, B.C. ...

He repeated his family’s three values during both of our chats. Then he explained what made Samsung’s culture unique—a devotion ...

muster of peacocks roamed, and spent a lot of time in Japan with his second wife, Kurata Michiko, a hairdresser, and the son and ...

Dynasty Ascendant “I THINK THEY [SAMSUNG] are mimicking exactly the old ways,” Jisoo Lee, a corporate governance lawyer who’d tu ...

Hong Jin-ki was a colorful lawyer with a love for poetry and words. In 1965, B.C. founded Samsung’s newspaper, the JoongAng Ilbo ...

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS General Park Chung-hee, center, on the day of the coup d’état, May 16, 1961. As Samsung’s founder and a revile ...

who’d flirted with communism as a youngster, he was not a man to question. “You can say anything, so talk without reservations,” ...

first introduced to Koreans by their Japanese overlords earlier in the century. The regime seized private banks owned by Samsung ...

Korean farmers wearing traditional costumes stood side by side with businessmen and government officials in trim, Western-style ...

IN 1968, B.C. FORMALLY reinstated himself as chairman of Samsung. He was determined to pass the company to his youngest son, Lee ...

March of the Samsung Men IN 1974 SAMSUNG CEO Jin-ku (J.K.) Kang got a call from a California entrepreneur named Joseph Sudduth, ...

to compete with, and even best, Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, thanks to long-term government backing. Samsung would be a di ...

After much deliberation, B.C. was convinced. — IN FEBRUARY 1983, B.C. woke up early in his suite at the Hotel Okura in Tokyo to ...

ambushed them several times, forcing them to solve games and puzzles on the spot. “Find a living thing and bring it to me,” the ...