SEOUL -- Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of Samsung who died on Sunday, learned technologies and corporate management know-how from Japan, helping his company become a global powerhouse that outrivals Japanese firms.
-- Topping market share
Lee encountered Japan's advanced technologies from his student days when he was leading a solitary life as a foreign student in Japan.
"Buying electronics that just came out and thoroughly studying them was my hobby," he wrote in an essay.
Lee was said to have had a high regard for Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic Corp., and to have been well-versed in the quality improvement and management methods of Japanese companies.
His biggest achievement was that he decided to have Samsung Electronics expand into the semiconductor business despite opposition from his father and senior executives of the company. His father founded Samsung Group and had said that the company's technology was in such a sorry state that it could hardly produce TV sets properly let alone semiconductors.
In 1974 in the immediate aftermath of an oil crisis, a company called Hankook Semiconductor faced financial difficulties. Lee then moved to acquire the company, injecting his private funds into the purchase.
Afterward, he visited Japan almost every week, meeting with Japanese semiconductor engineers. He was fluent in Japanese thanks to his ample experience of living in Japan.
He wrote in an essay that he often took Japanese engineers to his company in South Korea on Saturdays, keeping it secret from their employers in Japan. Many of the engineers only returned to Japan on Sunday after they instructed Samsung engineers in semiconductor technologies all night long.
Consequently, its microchip division grew to become Samsung's major business. After chasing Japanese and U.S. semiconductor manufacturers, Samsung grew to become the top firm in terms of global market share in memory chips in the early half of the 1990s.
But in 1993, Lee was dumbfounded after reading an analysis in a report by Tamio Fukuda, then an adviser of Samsung Electronics (currently a professor emeritus at Kyoto Institute of Technology), saying that the way the employees at Samsung Electronics work and the level of its product design were both below-average, leaving the company hardly able to compete with others unless the company changes.
Then something flashed across Lee's mind. Shortly before, he had visited a supermarket in Los Angeles and was shocked to see his company's products gathering dust in a corner of the store.
-- Change everything, almost
In June 1993, Lee summoned about 100 Samsung executives to a meeting in Frankfurt while he was on a business trip there. He announced Samsung's new management declaration, saying the company needed to shift its emphasis from quantity to quality. He instructed the executives to reform by saying, "Change everything except your wife and children."
Lee injected the company's resources through a management strategy of selection and concentration into three targeted areas: semiconductors, LCDs, and information and communications.
Today, Samsung is looking to spur future growth through businesses such as electric vehicle batteries and biopharmaceutical products.
This can also be called a legacy of Lee incessantly making aggressive investments, taking on large-scale deficits during the initial stage, as he advocated that the company become No. 1 and always hold the top position in the field.
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