was set up on the roof of Chairman Lee’s home, many assumed to monitor
the home of Chairman Lee’s estranged elder brother’s family nearby.
Almost two decades later, in 2012, the brother’s company, Cheil Jedang,
claimed to police that it had footage of a Samsung C&T (which stands for
Construction and Trading) employee tailing a rival family member,
Chairman Lee’s nephew. The incident happened after Chairman Lee’s
estranged elder brother filed an inheritance lawsuit against Chairman Lee,
attempting to get what he believed was his fair share of the Samsung
empire. Four Samsung employees were indicted and fined without being
convicted; Samsung denied the allegation.
Twelve days after B.C.’s death, the new chairman made his first major
public appearance at the company, with a speech under the slogan the
“Second Foundation,” waving a company flag before the crowd.
“I am going to found the second establishment with my young
ambitions and enterprising spirit,” he proclaimed. In an act of filial piety,
he named his home Seungjiwon, a portmanteau that means “respecting and
following my father’s wishes.”
But the senior executives at Samsung seemed to pay little attention to
him. They considered him the “emperor’s son” and a “lucky heir,” as they
put it, referring to his older brother Maeng-hee’s effective banishment two
decades earlier, which had resulted in Lee being elevated.
And in fact the young chairman was an unproven leader.
“I was feeling bleak,” he wrote later in his 1997 book, Lee Kun-hee
Essays. “I had been partly involved in the management of the company
since I became Vice Chairman in 1979, but I’d always had the safety net of
my father.”
Three months after B.C.’s death, in February 1988, Samsung released
its greatest success to date in the electronics industry, the four-megabit
DRAM. It was the result of half a decade of work. It still left the company
roughly six months behind its Japanese competitors, but when Samsung had
begun to work on producing chips in 1983, it had been a generation behind,
and few people had thought it could catch up. It had made huge strides in
closing the gap.
Samsung executives took the first semiconductor off the assembly line
and laid it on B.C. Lee’s grave, in a sign of gratitude and respect.