Before chips and phones, Samsung sold dried fish and noodles
Samsung began in 1938 as a forty-person trading shop in Taegu run by Lee Byung-chul, dealing in dried fish, local groceries and noodles. The name means three stars: three for something big, numerous and powerful, stars for lasting forever. It took three decades of detours before the firm built its first television.
Lee moved the head office to Seoul in 1947, then fled south when the Korean War broke out and started a sugar refinery, Cheil Jedang, in Pusan. In 1954 he opened a woollen mill in Taegu, the largest in the country at the time, and the group spread into insurance, securities and retail. Only in the late 1960s did it enter electronics, opening a plant at Suwon whose first product was a black-and-white television; the first Samsung Electronics-branded set went on sale in South Korea in 1972. Shipbuilding and construction followed in the mid-1970s, and in 1980 the purchase of a telecoms firm in Kumi, first making switchboards, laid the foundations of its phone business.
When Lee died in 1987, the empire split into five groups, with Shinsegae, CJ, Hansol and JoongAng eventually becoming fully independent. What remained bet heavily on research. Samsung became the largest memory-chip producer in 1992, and in 1993 Lee Kun-hee trimmed the group down to electronics, engineering and chemicals. It weathered the 1997 Asian financial crisis better than most Korean rivals, though its car venture went to Renault at a heavy loss.
Some sidelines are surprising. In 1995 the textile arm backed FUBU, an American hip hop clothing label whose founder had advertised for funding in The New York Times. Samsung's builders worked on one of the Petronas Towers, Taipei 101 and the Burj Khalifa. In 2006 Sony, lacking its own large LCD factories, formed a panel joint venture with Samsung, whose stake Samsung bought out in 2011.
Phones became the core. In the first quarter of 2012 Samsung passed Nokia, leader since 1998, as the biggest mobile maker by units. That August an American jury ordered it to pay Apple 1.05 billion dollars for infringing six smartphone patents, less than the 2.5 billion Apple sought, and its shares dropped 7.7 percent. By 2015 it was collecting more U.S. patents than any other company, 7,679 by mid-December. Today Samsung is the largest of Korea's family-controlled chaebol.
Source: Samsung
