computers or going in certain sensitive rooms. So the Korean engineers
visited with eyes open, memorizing the diagrams they saw. They returned
to the hotel room each night to re-create the diagrams, piecing together the
incredibly complicated semiconductor charts from memory.
They gave gifts of pottery to Japanese executives at a joint Japanese-
Taiwanese manufacturer called PSC, now defunct, in exchange for the
opportunity to buy PSC’s parts and chipset-making equipment, something
the Japanese had a near monopoly on.
“Having had a lot of experience in Japan, I threw myself into traveling
back and forth from our semiconductor plant to Japan in order to secure the
technology,” Lee Kun-hee, now promoted to vice chairman, wrote in his
memoir. “Traveling to Japan to meet semiconductor experts almost every
week, I tried to learn from them anything that might be of use. At the time,
I would often secretly bring in Japanese experts on Saturday and have them
teach my engineers overnight, before sending them back on Sunday.”
“The Japanese brought this precision that we didn’t have,” Nam-yoon
said. “It was a cultural difference.”
B.C. knew Samsung couldn’t afford to go on losing money forever.
Semiconductors were expensive to manufacture, and government support
was not guaranteed indefinitely. Japanese firms, meanwhile, were dumping
their chipsets on the market, wreaking losses on Samsung.
B.C. diverted the profits from other Samsung businesses to prop up the
semiconductor projects for the time being. It would have been impossible
to do in a publicly traded American company, forced to focus on short-
term profits. B.C., now in his seventies and diagnosed with lung cancer, felt
an increasing sense of urgency.
“He predicted that when he died, Samsung would just collapse,” Henry
Cho told me.
In December 1987, South Korea’s Chun Doo-hwan stepped down as the
country’s leader following mass protests, opening the way for the country’s
first democratic elections. With the 1988 Seoul Olympics opening in two
months, the economy was bustling, fueling a patriotic fervor that everyone
hoped would bolster Samsung’s standing in the world.
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A SAMSUNG ADVERTISEMENT FROM the period, created to celebrate