SAMSUNG

Samsung has been the world's most popular consumer electronics brand since 2005 and is the best known South Korean brand in the world.Samsung Group accounts for more than 20% of South Korea's total exports and is the leader in many domestic industries, such as the financial, chemical, retail and entertainment industries.


Samsung brand, including Samsung Electronics, the world's largest electronics company, Samsung Heavy Industries, the world's second largest shipbuilder and Samsung Engineering & Construction, a major global construction company.



Lee Byung-Chull founded Samsung, a small trading company with forty employees located in Daegu, in 1938,. The company prospered until the Communist invasion in 1950 when he was forced to leave Seoul and start over in Busan. During the war, Samsung's businesses flourished and its assets grew twenty-fold. In 1953, Lee started a sugar refinery—South, Korea’s first manufacturing facility after the Korean War. The company diversified into many areas and Lee sought to establish Samsung as an industry leader in a wide range of enterprises (Samsung Electronics). The company started moving into businesses such as insurance, securities, and retail. In the early 1970s, Lee borrowed heavily from foreign interests and launched a radio and television station (Samsung Electronics).



South Korean President Park Chung-hee’s regime during the 1960s and 1970s would prove a boon for Samsung. Park placed great importance on industrialization, and focused his economic development strategy on a handful of large domestic conglomerates, protecting them from competition and assisting them financially. Samsung was one of these companies. Park banned several foreign companies from selling consumer electronics in South Korea in order to protect Samsung from foreign competition and nurture an electronics manufacturing sector that was in its infancy.

Samsung Group later formed several electronics-related divisions, such as Samsung Electronics Devices Co., Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co., Samsung Corning Co., and Samsung Semiconductor & Telecommunications Co., and grouped them together under Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. in 1980s. Its first product was a black-and-white television set (Samsung Electronics).In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Samsung Electronics invested heavily in research and development, investments that were pivotal in pushing the company to the forefront of the global electronics industry.



In 2008, Samsung became the largest mobile phone maker in the United States and 2nd largest mobile phone maker in the World after Nokia.Samsung Electronics, which saw record profits and revenue in 2004 and 2005, overtook Sony as one of the world's most popular consumer electronics brands, and is now ranked #20 in the world overall.By late 2005, Samsung had a net worth of US$77.6 billion.On April 21 2008, Lee Kun-hee resigned as the chairman of Samsung Electronics owing to the Samsung slush funds scandal.