Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-hee, who turned the group into a global telecommunications giant, died Sunday at the age of 78, the South Korean group said. Under his leadership, Samsung has grown to become the largest producer of smartphones and microchips on the planet, with global sales now equivalent to one-fifth of the country’s gross domestic product.
Known for his lonely lifestyle, Lee Kun-hee had been bedridden since a heart attack in 2014. Little information about his health has leaked out, leaving his existence shrouded in a halo of mystery until his last days. “It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Lee Kun-hee, president of Samsung Electronics,” the group said in a statement. “President Lee passed away on October 25 with his family, including Vice President Jay Y. Lee, by his side.”
“President Lee was a true visionary who transformed Samsung from a local company into a global leader in innovation and industrial power,” the company praised, adding, “His legacy will last forever. Samsung is by far the largest of the country’s “chaebols”, family-controlled conglomerates. At the origin of the prodigious recovery after the Korean War, today the 12e economy in the world, they are today accused of having opaque links with political power and of hampering all competition.
A lonely “hermit king”
Lee Kun-hee was himself convicted of corruption in 1996, then corruption and tax evasion in 2008. But he had escaped jail, having been given a suspended sentence. When he inherited the presidency of the Samsung Group in 1987, founded by his father, a fruit and fish exporter, the company was already the country’s largest conglomerate, with a business line ranging from electronics to large public to construction. Lee Kun-hee then concentrated the activity of the company to make it an international group. When it suffered a heart attack in 2014, Samsung had become the world’s largest maker of smartphones and memory chips. Today, it is also a major global player in the field of semiconductors and LCD screens.
However, Lee Kun-hee rarely ventured outside the high walls of his private estate in central Seoul to the company’s headquarters, which earned him the nickname “Hermit King”. His son Lee Jae-yong, vice president of Samsung Electronics, has been at the helm of the company since the heart attack of 2014. Lee Jae-yong was sentenced to five years in prison in 2017 after being convicted of bribery and other offenses related to former President Park Geun-hye, then was cleared of the most serious charges on appeal and released a year later. This case is still ongoing.
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