The Confucian and the Hippie
IN 1979 IRA MAGAZINER, a future adviser to President Bill Clinton, visited
Samsung’s Suwon campus as a British government consultant to consider
the potential of a larger market for Samsung’s black-and-white televisions.
He was not impressed.
“Samsung’s research lab”—with a bare concrete floor and people
wheeling products around by hand—“reminded me of a dilapidated high
school classroom,” he wrote. He met a young chief engineer who was a
recent graduate of an American university.
“I asked him about Samsung’s color-television strategy, telling him I
presumed the company planned to buy parts from overseas, [performing
the] assembly in Korea.
“Not at all, he said. They were going to make everything themselves—
even the color picture tube. They’d already identified the best foreign
models, he said, and signed agreements for technical assistance.” Soon, the
engineer predicted, Samsung would be exporting televisions worldwide.
“I wasn’t convinced,” Magaziner wrote. Maybe in ten or fifteen years,
he thought. But Samsung was starting out generations behind American and
British technology.
“But the work going on there intrigued me,” he wrote. “They’d gathered
color televisions from every major company in the world—RCA, GE,
Hitachi—and were using them to design a model of their own.”
Magaziner returned five years later as a consultant for GE. And he was
surprised to find that the South Koreans had done everything they
promised. They were making the key parts for their TVs—from the tubes
down to the glass—in a joint venture with Corning.