In 1987, when the late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee, who died today (25), took office in 1987, Samsung was evaluated as the best company in Korea, but its presence on the world stage was insignificant.
At the time, Samsung was a latecomer struggling as a pursuit by benchmarking Sony and others in Japan, but now it has grown into a leading company in the world market enough to say,'Let's learn from Samsung' from Sony.
The vision that the deceased announced at the inauguration ceremony of the chairman,'We will grow Samsung into a world-class company' has become reality.
In 1993, Chairman Lee's'Frankfurt Shin-Young Declaration', compressed into the words "Change everything except your wife and children," came from the desperate sense of crisis that you cannot survive in the market unless you thoroughly improve the constitution of the group.
Samsung succeeded in innovating and improving its constitution based on this sense of crisis, and was able to stand out as the world's largest and best company by breaking the checks of global competitors such as Sony and Apple.
It was with the success of the semiconductor business that Samsung began to be recognized for its technology and quality on the world stage.
Founded in January 1969, Samsung Electronics laid the foundation for growth in home appliance businesses such as TVs and refrigerators, and then acquired Korea Semiconductor in 1974, laying the groundwork for the semiconductor business.
The deceased, who was a director of a Samsung subsidiary at the time, heard the news that Korea Semiconductor was on the verge of going bankrupt and took over Korea Semiconductor by stealing personal property.
Seondae Chairman Lee Byung-cheol and other executives are skeptical about the advancement, saying,'I can't make TVs properly, can semiconductors be possible?'
At that time, in the aftermath of the'first oil shock', world-class companies such as Fairchild, Intel, and National began restructuring and reducing production.
Samsung developed an integrated circuit chip for electronic wrist watches in 1975, and succeeded in producing transistors for the first time in Korea the following year, and also equipped a 3-inch wafer (semiconductor disk) facility, which was the most advanced at the time, at its Bucheon plant.
In 1982, we succeeded in developing 64K DRAM for the third time in the world after the United States and Japan, and 10 years later, in 1992, we succeeded in developing the world's first 64M DRAM and stood out as a leader in the semiconductor market.
Since then, Samsung has continued to grow without ever giving up the world's No. 1 position in the memory semiconductor market.
In addition to DRAM, flash memory and system memory, which are widely used in various digital portable devices such as smartphones, have continued to develop and continue to invest and develop.
In this process, the decision of the stack method when developing the 4M DRAM, and the introduction of the world's first 8-inch wafer for mass production of 16M DRAM were all known as the decision of Chairman Lee Kun-hee.
In particular, at the time of introducing the 8-inch wafer, no company could readily choose this method due to technical difficulties, and if it failed, it was a situation that would have to bear a loss of over KRW 1 trillion, but at the decision of Chairman Lee, the introduction of 8-inch was proceeded.
Chairman Lee Kun-hee did not settle for the success of the semiconductor business and started to pioneer the mobile phone market.
Samsung's entry into the mobile phone market was around the time Chairman Lee declared Shin-Young.
At this time, Motorola of the United States was dominating the domestic mobile phone market.
Samsung launched its first mobile phone ambitiously in 1994, but the defect rate reached 11.8%, which was rejected by the market.
Accordingly, Chairman Lee emphasized the need to fundamentally improve Samsung's constitution by carrying out a shocking'burning form' in which 150,000 defective mobile phones were collected and burned at the Gumi plant in 1995.
The stubborn efforts to improve quality, which began in this way, have come to fruition, and in August of that year, Anycall surpassed Motorola and took the top spot in Korea with a market share of 51.5%.
At that time, Korea remained the only market that Motorola, the world's largest market share, could not occupy high ground.
Based on these product capabilities, Anycall has grown not only domestically, but also worldwide.
If semiconductors fed Samsung until the early 2000s, then mobile phones have become a viable product that drives Samsung's growth.
Chairman Lee retired from management through a special prosecutor's investigation and returned to the front line in 2010.
This was a time when the smartphone craze broke out as the iPhone from Apple dominated the global mobile phone market.
Samsung, who was soaked in the'anycall myth', faced a serious crisis at one time as it responded belatedly to the explosively growing smartphone market at the time.
Even Nokia, which was marked as the absolute powerhouse in the mobile phone market, has been on the path of decline since then.
Failure to pursue Apple could lead to a huge gap.
Samsung released'Omnia 2', an upgraded smartphone in August 2009, ahead of the domestic market of the iPhone.
However, I had to face cold reactions such as'Isn't it just the shape of a smartphone?'
However, the following year, we set a foothold for the pursuit by introducing the'Galaxy S', which brought together the group's capabilities.
At the time, the Galaxy S was not enough to threaten Apple, but Samsung did not stop there and quickly pursued Apple by releasing the Galaxy Tab, Galaxy S2, and Galaxy S3 one after another.
The Galaxy S2, released in April 2011, has sold more than 40 million units with improved hardware and advanced software.
From this point on, Samsung's full-scale smartphone race begins.
In the third quarter of 2011, when the Galaxy S2 was introduced to the market in earnest, Samsung finally surpassed Apple and regained the No. 1 spot in the global smartphone market.
The world's strongest Apple publicly dismissed Samsung's Galaxy phone as the iPhone's'copycat' (replica) and warned.
The nerve war between these two companies has also spread to dozens of patent lawsuits.
On the one hand, even this fight was evaluated as a cross section confirming the two-strong system of Samsung and Apple in the global market.
It proves how Samsung’s weight class is in the global market.
Samsung Electronics' smartphones have been ranked No. 1 in terms of sales in the global market since 2012.
In addition, TV and home appliances, which are the basis of the company's business, have also maintained the global No. 1 position for over 10 years.
The Bordeaux Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) TV, which was introduced in 2006, has become a stepping stone for Samsung Electronics to surpass Sony to achieve the world's No. 1 TV market.
In 2009, the 40th anniversary of the founding of Samsung Electronics, it introduced a light-emitting diode (LED) TV that evolved from LCD, and in 2017, it is constantly evolving by launching a quantum dot light-emitting diode (QLED) TV.
Recently, we are focusing on'QLED 8K TV' and extra-large TV, and after 8K, we are setting up a'two-track' strategy with micro LED.