Lee Kun-Hee

Lee Kun-Hee was a South Korean businessman who was chairman (1987–2008; 2010–20) of the conglomerate Samsung Group and chairman of its flagship company, Samsung Electronics (2010–20).

Lee was the youngest son of Lee Byung-Chull, who founded Samsung in 1938. He majored in economics at Waseda University, Tokyo, and earned a master of business administration degree at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. An active sportsman, Lee spent his leisure time riding horses, racing sports cars on a private track, and raising dogs. In addition, he was president of the Korean Amateur Wrestling Association and was involved with a professional baseball team and amateur athletics.

In 1968 Lee joined Samsung, which was involved in electronics, machinery, chemicals, and financial services. He served as the quiet understudy of his father, who exercised absolute control over the conglomerate and decided against making two older sons his successors. After his father’s death in 1987, Lee became chairman of Samsung but left management to a corporate staff. In June 1993, however, Lee launched a dramatic revolution from the top to make Samsung—the largest Asian conglomerate outside Japan—internationally competitive. Declaring that Samsung was “second rate” by global standards, he called on each employee “to change everything but your family.” Lee attributed the shortcomings of Samsung to basic weaknesses in Korean society, including an educational system that stressed learning by rote and an authoritarian style of leadership. He ordered radical reforms. Under what Lee termed a “new management” concept, Samsung insisted that subordinates point out errors to their bosses. It also stressed quality of products over quantity, promoted women to the ranks of senior executives, and discouraged bureaucratic practices.

Having emerged from a shy figurehead to an assertive chief executive, Lee pushed Samsung into many new activities, such as automobile manufacturing. Bolstered by a surge of investment, he aimed to make 20 percent of Samsung’s products outside South Korea by the year 2000. Consequently, he built an electronics manufacturing complex in Wynyard, England, and semiconductor plants in both Austin, Texas, and Suzhou, China. He also acquired such companies as the U.S. computer maker AST Research, Rollei Camera in Germany, and Lux, a Japanese manufacturer of audio products. By 1996 Samsung Electronics ranked as the world’s leading exporter of memory chips, and the entire group’s revenues in 1995 totaled $87 billion, equivalent to about 19 percent of South Korea’s gross domestic product.

In 1996 Lee was also among 11 prominent South Korean businessmen drawn into a political scandal over corporate contributions to former president Roh Tae Woo. A court ruled that such payments—though customary in South Korea—were bribes. In August 1996 Lee was sentenced to two years in prison, but the punishment was suspended for three years. He was later pardoned by Pres. Kim Young Sam. In the late 1990s, Lee guided Samsung safely through the Asian financial crisis, and at the start of the 21st century it was one of the largest conglomerates in the world. In April 2008, however, Lee was indicted on charges of breach of trust and tax evasion, and shortly thereafter he resigned as chairman of Samsung. In July he was convicted of tax evasion, and he was subsequently fined approximately $80 million and sentenced to three years suspended jail time. Lee was pardoned by the South Korean government in December 2009.

In March 2010 Samsung Group executives made Lee the head of Samsung Electronics, the conglomerate’s largest division. Later that year he returned as chairman of the Samsung Group. However, in 2014 he suffered a heart attack that left him incapacitated. Although Lee retained his posts, his son, Lee Jae-Yong, became the de facto leader of the Samsung Group. In 2018 it was announced that the elder Lee was again being investigated for tax evasion.