Samsung executives gathered around a fresh grave on a crisp February day in 1988. They placed a tribute on the burial site: a tiny piece of metal and silicon, the four megabit DRAM chip. It was a bittersweet moment. The chip represented Samsung’s potential to be a serious player in semiconductor manufacturing, marking their greatest electronics success to date. But Samsung was also reeling from a loss. The loss of their founder and chairman — the man who had grown the company from one dried fish shop to an empire — Lee Byung-chul.
B.C. Lee, as he is so often called, started Samsung in 1938. Over the next forty years, he built the foundations of the conglomerate we know today — more details on B.C. Lee’s career may be found here. He died of lung cancer in November 1987. Twenty-five minutes after his last breath, Samsung had a new chairman: B.C. Lee’s third son, Lee Kun-hee.
B.C. Lee with a very young Lee Kun-hee (public domain photo).
A young Lee Kun-hee (Samsung file photo).
Lee Kun-hee had been named successor by B.C. Lee in 1976. Samsung’s semiconductor business owed its existence, in large part, to Lee Kun-hee. In the 1980s, B.C. Lee wanted to shut the division down, convinced it could never catch up to its American counterparts. Lee Kun-hee changed his mind. So strong was Lee’s conviction that he travelled to Japan to meet semiconductor experts almost every week. He even flew Japanese experts to South Korea in secret to teach his engineers.
By 1988, Samsung’s semiconductor business had gained momentum, and Lee Kun-hee was in charg ...
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