“teaching him how to engage with people internationally.” He then
beckoned him to their table. “Hyun introduced us, saying to Jay that he
should get to know me, as I was a big customer of his.”
Rolls-Royce had just signed an agreement with Samsung in which
Samsung would supply the components for a new jet engine, the Rolls-
Royce Trent 900, used in the Airbus A830.
“Jay said he didn’t understand, as Samsung no longer made cars,” Alan
recounted. Told that Samsung made the core of the engine for the A380
aircraft for Rolls-Royce, Jay still seemed mystified. He said he didn’t know
about his family’s jet engine company, Samsung Techwin, and said he had
never been to its plant in Sacheon.
“He said that his father doesn’t have a Rolls-Royce but a Bentley,” Alan
said. It was an awkward and unsettling moment. The two bade each other
goodbye without discussing their supplier relationship.
“That was my only interchange with Jay,” Plumb told me, “someone I
marked down as unsuitable to run a group, since he didn’t have basic
knowledge of the businesses he would one day be managing.”
In 2004 Jay asked a Japanese engineer at Samsung why a device that
played both VHS tapes and DVDs was selling well. He didn’t seem to
realize that people were still watching their old videocassette tapes. All of
this underscored the importance of educating Samsung’s heir.
“Jay came into design meetings a lot,” a Samsung TV designer told me.
“He was very interested in design and learning about it, but the big
decisions on design came from G.S. Choi.”
—
“WHICH DEVICE IS GOING to be the center of multimedia, the PC or the
TV? We believe TV is the winner,” Kim Gaeyoun, director of visual
display product planning, told me in November 2010. Mobile executives
disagreed and insisted to me that mobile phones were the center of tech.
“That became a fun rivalry,” said Bill Ogle, former CMO for Samsung’s
mobile marketing unit in Texas. The competition between Samsung’s TV
and mobile divisions extended to who could build the higher office tower
next to the other in Suwon.
“The TV side added four floors to their building,” he said. “Then the
mobile phone side added five floors to their building. So the TV side added