Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee passes away

BusinessSamsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee passes away

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Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee passes away

Seoul: Lee Kun-hee, the Chairman of South Korea’s tech giant Samsung Electronics, died at the age of 78 here on Sunday, according to a statement released by the company.

Lee transformed Samsung into a world-leading innovator and industrial powerhouse from a local business, Xinhua news agency quoted the statement as saying.

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.

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.

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