Samsung's Lee: Tainted titan who built a global tech giant | The Business Standard
Skip to main content
  • Latest
  • Economy
    • Banking
    • Stocks
    • Industry
    • Analysis
    • Bazaar
    • RMG
    • Corporates
    • Aviation
  • Videos
    • TBS Today
    • TBS Stories
    • TBS World
    • News of the day
    • TBS Programs
    • Podcast
    • Editor's Pick
  • World+Biz
  • Features
    • Panorama
    • The Big Picture
    • Pursuit
    • Habitat
    • Thoughts
    • Splash
    • Mode
    • Tech
    • Explorer
    • Brands
    • In Focus
    • Book Review
    • Earth
    • Food
    • Luxury
    • Wheels
  • More
    • Sports
    • TBS Graduates
    • Bangladesh
    • Supplement
    • Infograph
    • Archive
    • Gallery
    • Long Read
    • Interviews
    • Offbeat
    • Magazine
    • Climate Change
    • Health
    • Cartoons
  • বাংলা
The Business Standard

Thursday
June 12, 2025

Sign In
Subscribe
  • Latest
  • Economy
    • Banking
    • Stocks
    • Industry
    • Analysis
    • Bazaar
    • RMG
    • Corporates
    • Aviation
  • Videos
    • TBS Today
    • TBS Stories
    • TBS World
    • News of the day
    • TBS Programs
    • Podcast
    • Editor's Pick
  • World+Biz
  • Features
    • Panorama
    • The Big Picture
    • Pursuit
    • Habitat
    • Thoughts
    • Splash
    • Mode
    • Tech
    • Explorer
    • Brands
    • In Focus
    • Book Review
    • Earth
    • Food
    • Luxury
    • Wheels
  • More
    • Sports
    • TBS Graduates
    • Bangladesh
    • Supplement
    • Infograph
    • Archive
    • Gallery
    • Long Read
    • Interviews
    • Offbeat
    • Magazine
    • Climate Change
    • Health
    • Cartoons
  • বাংলা
THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 2025
Samsung's Lee: Tainted titan who built a global tech giant

Tech

Reuters
25 October, 2020, 08:50 am
Last modified: 25 October, 2020, 11:47 am

Related News

  • Samsung launches slimmest smartphone as races against rival Apple
  • Samsung fights $520 million India tax demand, points to Reliance practice
  • What Samsung and Vietnam stand to lose in Trump's tariff war
  • Samsung backtracked from investing $22b during AL regime due to land problems: Bida chairman
  • Samsung Electronics says co-CEO Han Jong-hee has died of cardiac arrest

Samsung's Lee: Tainted titan who built a global tech giant

In the mid-1990s, Lee personally recalled around $50 million worth of poor quality mobile phones and fax machines, and set fire to them

Reuters
25 October, 2020, 08:50 am
Last modified: 25 October, 2020, 11:47 am
File Photo: Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee (C) arrives at a main office of the Federation of Korean Industries, the country' biggest business lobby group, to meet President-elect Lee Myung-bak with other businessmen in Seoul December 28, 2007/ Reuters
File Photo: Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee (C) arrives at a main office of the Federation of Korean Industries, the country' biggest business lobby group, to meet President-elect Lee Myung-bak with other businessmen in Seoul December 28, 2007/ Reuters

In February 1993, five years after taking over from his father at South Korea's Samsung Group, 51-year-old Lee Kun-hee was frustrated that he wasn't making his mark.

He summoned a group of Samsung Electronics executives to a Best Buy store in Los Angeles for a reality check on the Samsung brand. Covered in dust, a Samsung TV set sat on a corner shelf with a price tag nearly $100 cheaper than a rival Sony Corp model.

After a tense nine-hour follow-up meeting, Lee kick-started a strategic shift at Samsung - to gain market share through quality, not quantity.

The Business Standard Google News Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel

Lee, who died aged 78 on Sunday after being hospitalised for a heart attack in 2014, was driven by a constant sense of crisis, which he instilled in his leadership teams to drive change and fight complacency. In the mid-1990s, Lee personally recalled around $50 million worth of poor quality mobile phones and fax machines, and set fire to them.

This focus on crisis, and his often abrasive manner, helped Lee grow his father Lee Byung-chull's noodle trading business into a sprawling business empire with assets worth 424 trillion won ($375 billion) as of May 2020 in dozens of affiliates stretching from electronics and insurance to shipbuilding and construction.

Samsung Electronics developed from a second-tier TV maker to the world's biggest technology firm by revenue - seeing off Japanese brands Sony, Sharp Corp and Panasonic Corp in chips, TVs and displays; ending Nokia Oyj's handset supremacy and beating Apple Inc in smartphones.

In a 1997 essay, Lee recalled his frustration at management inertia. "The external business environment was not good ... but there was no sense of anxiety within the organization, and everyone appeared to be eaten up with self-conceit ... I needed to tighten them up a bit and repeatedly reminded managers of the need to have the sense of crisis."

In 2013, Forbes named Lee as the second most powerful South Korean, ranked only behind United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Feared And Revered

Four months after the Los Angeles meeting, Lee called his lieutenants to a Frankfurt hotel conference room, where he laid out his "New Management" plan, exhorting executives to "change everything except your wife and children."

Executive meetings proved brutal, often stretching to 10 hours, with participants afraid to even drink water as they didn't want to have to interrupt Lee's flow by visiting the washroom.

Lee's business acumen made him the object of endless fascination and speculation in Korea, but he and the empire he built have also been vilified by critics and activist shareholders for wielding such economic clout, hierarchical and opaque governance, and dubious transfers of the family wealth.

In 2008, Lee was accused of managing a political slush fund and of helping his children buy Samsung company shares on the cheap. Prosecutors failed to prove either charge, but Lee was convicted of tax evasion and embezzlement. He apologized and stepped down, only to return within two years following a presidential pardon.

He had since kept a lower profile and delegated to an army of managers, while promoting his son, Jay Y Lee, to vice chairman, a grooming post for the eventual transfer of power.

As his health deteriorated - Lee needed help in walking and was susceptible to respiratory diseases following lung cancer treatment - he was a less frequent presence at Samsung's headquarters, spending long winter vacations in Japan or Hawaii.

But his hold over the group remained undimmed. Whenever he travelled overseas, at least four of Samsung's top executives, along with company crew and security, would be at the airport to see him off.

At Samsung's human resources development center, the tens of thousands of employees attending training sessions pay a silent vigil to a mock-up of the drab Frankfurt hotel conference room - with furniture specially imported from Germany. As most of Samsung's staff are in their 20s and 30s and didn't experience Lee's managerial heyday first-hand, this homage serves to remind them of the need to 'think crisis," several people who have been trained at the center said.

Japan Exposure

Lee was born in 1942 in the southern Korean village of Uiryeong, the third son of Samsung's founder. He was sent to Japan at the age of 11, just after the Korean war ended. His father wanted his sons to learn how Japan was rebuilding from the ashes of World War Two.

He has admitted to being a loner and found it tough to make friends when he returned home to a country riven with anti-Japanese sentiment. He went back to Japan to study economics at Waseda University, and then business management at George Washington University in the United States.

His early exposure to Japan's advanced technology led him to establish the basis of Samsung Electronics by forming alliances with the likes of Sanyo, and adopting chip making and TV manufacturing technologies.

Lee began his Samsung career in broadcasting, working his way up to group chairman by 1987, breaking with the traditional Confucian practice of the eldest son taking over the reins. His older brother, Lee Maeng-hee, was initially chosen to lead Samsung in 1967 when his father retired, but his aggressive management style caused friction with the founder's confidants, according to several books about Samsung.

The second son, Lee Chang-hee, severed family ties by telling the presidential office that his father had a $1 million slush fund overseas.

Lee senior exiled Chang-hee to the United States and returned as chairman himself. In 1976, diagnosed with cancer, he handed the business down to Kun-hee. Chang-hee died in 1991.

Kun-hee's hunched posture, due to a traffic accident, soft voice, round eyes and often bemused expression were atypical for such a powerful character. Married to Hong Ra-hee, who runs a Samsung-affiliated art gallery called the Leeum - a combination of Lee and museum - Lee had a son and three daughters.

His youngest daughter died in New York in 2005, which Samsung said at a car accident but media reports said was a suicide.

Lee had been a member of the International Olympic Committee between 1996 and 2017.

($1 = 1,127.9500 won)

Top News / World+Biz

Samsung / Samsung Electronics / Lee Kun-hee

Comments

While most comments will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive, moderation decisions are subjective. Published comments are readers’ own views and The Business Standard does not endorse any of the readers’ comments.

Top Stories

  • Keir Starmer declines to meet CA Yunus: FT report
    Keir Starmer declines to meet CA Yunus: FT report
  • Saifuzzaman Chowdhury. Photo: Collected
    UK crime agency now freezes assets of ex-land minister Saifuzzaman: AJ
  • Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus speaks at the Chatham House in London on 11 June 2025. Photo: CA Press Wing
    No desire to be part of next elected govt: CA Yunus

MOST VIEWED

  • File photo of ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina and her son Sajeeb Wazed Joy. Photo: Collected
    Joy spends Eid with Hasina in India: Indian media
  • Infofgraphics: TBS
    DGHS issues 11-point directive to prevent spread of Covid-19 in Bangladesh
  • Saifuzzaman Chowdhury. Photo: Collected
    UK crime agency now freezes assets of ex-land minister Saifuzzaman: AJ
  • File photo of BNP Standing Committee Member Amir Khasru Mahmud Chowdhury. Photo: Collected
    Khasru flies to London ahead of Yunus-Tarique meeting
  • Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus speaks at the Chatham House in London on 11 June 2025. Photo: CA Press Wing
    No desire to be part of next elected govt: CA Yunus
  • Illustration: Khandaker Abidur Rahman/TBS
    Three hospitals ‘held hostage’ as discharged July uprising injured keep occupying beds

Related News

  • Samsung launches slimmest smartphone as races against rival Apple
  • Samsung fights $520 million India tax demand, points to Reliance practice
  • What Samsung and Vietnam stand to lose in Trump's tariff war
  • Samsung backtracked from investing $22b during AL regime due to land problems: Bida chairman
  • Samsung Electronics says co-CEO Han Jong-hee has died of cardiac arrest

Features

Among pet birds in the country, lovebirds are the most common, and they are also the most numerous in the haat. Photo: Junayet Rashel

Where feathers meet fortune: How a small pigeon stall became Dhaka’s premiere bird market

13h | Panorama
Illustration: Duniya Jahan/ TBS

Forget Katy Perry, here’s Bangladesh’s Ruthba Yasmin shooting for the moon

1d | Features
File photo of Eid holidaymakers returning to the capital from their country homes/Rajib Dhar

Dhaka: The city we never want to return to, but always do

2d | Features
Photo collage shows political posters in Bagerhat. Photos: Jannatul Naym Pieal

From Sheikh Dynasty to sibling rivalry: Bagerhat signals a turning tide in local politics

4d | Bangladesh

More Videos from TBS

Why is Omicron XBB more contagious?

Why is Omicron XBB more contagious?

10h | TBS Stories
What did Dr. Yunus say at the Chatham House Dialogue in London?

What did Dr. Yunus say at the Chatham House Dialogue in London?

11h | TBS Today
News of The Day, 11 JUNE 2025

News of The Day, 11 JUNE 2025

12h | TBS News of the day
WB predicts worst decade for global growth since 60s

WB predicts worst decade for global growth since 60s

13h | TBS Stories
EMAIL US
contact@tbsnews.net
FOLLOW US
WHATSAPP
+880 1847416158
The Business Standard
  • About Us
  • Contact us
  • Sitemap
  • Advertisement
  • Privacy Policy
  • Comment Policy
Copyright © 2025
The Business Standard All rights reserved
Technical Partner: RSI Lab

Contact Us

The Business Standard

Main Office -4/A, Eskaton Garden, Dhaka- 1000

Phone: +8801847 416158 - 59

Send Opinion articles to - oped.tbs@gmail.com

For advertisement- sales@tbsnews.net