Lee Kun-hee

Lee Kun-hee told his executives to change everything except their wives and children, and turned a maker of cheap televisions into the largest memory-chip company on earth. He inherited Samsung from his father in 1987. It was then a conglomerate known abroad, where it was known at all, for undercutting Japanese electronics on price. In 1993 he called two hundred executives to Frankfurt and talked at them for days about quality, in what the company still calls the Frankfurt Declaration. In 1995 he had fifteen million dollars' worth of defective phones, fax machines and televisions piled in a factory yard at Gumi, made the workers who built them watch, and had the pile burned and bulldozed. The strategy underneath the theatre was to spend heavily and counter-cyclically on memory fabrication, where demand collapses periodically and competitors stop investing; Samsung kept building through the troughs and came out of each one with a larger share. By the 2000s it led the world in memory chips and, later, in smartphones. He was convicted twice - of bribery in 1996 and of tax evasion and breach of trust in 2008 - and pardoned both times, the second so that he could remain on the International Olympic Committee and lobby for the 2018 Winter Games, which Pyeongchang won. He had a heart attack in 2014 and remained hospitalised and unresponsive for six years until his death in 2020, during which the company was run by his son. The inheritance tax his family then owed - about eleven billion dollars, the largest in Korean history - is the reason the succession had been arranged the way it was.

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