삼성

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Samsung (삼성) seems to dominate our lives these days.  They've put us up in nice corporate housing for our first month here, they are currently reviewing our lease for our new apartment (woohoo!), and they've provided for our intensive Korean lessons (a friend later told me that we learned just as much in five days as she and her husband learned in one semester of undergraduate Korean classes at Columbia -- I suppose that makes me feel better about my brain literally hurting after each class).

The first thing I see out my window when I wake up (still usually around sunrise) is Samsung (those are the tall buildings on the left).

Taking a walk in our greater neighborhood, it is nearly impossible to get lost with the Samsung towers as easy-to-spot landmarks.  They remind me of the glowing eyes in The Great Gatsby, which Gatsby feels are always watching him as he drives through Queens into Manhattan.

When I needed a new external hard drive earlier this week, on a whim we decided to check out the Samsung store.  Sure enough, they had them.  We spent about half an hour oohing and aahing, along with all the other shoppers, over the other cool gadgets (Samsung's curved tv is pretty darn cool).

And as we're learning, it's not just consumer electronics.  In fact, Samsung is made up of over 80 businesses, which on the whole, comprise a pretty random assortment of core focus areas (says the recovering strategy consultant).  The company makes ships (in its four million square foot shipyard -- see below!), cars (though now as a subsidiary of Renault), airplane components (supplying parts to the Airbus A380), and has businesses focused on life insurance and hospitality.  It owns a private university, Sungkyunkwan University, which has a history dating back to 1398.  It even has its own theme park called Everland Resort, which is South Korea's largest amusement park (complete with a zoo and a water park named Caribbean Bay... I hear employees get year-round free passes!)  And as we experienced last Sunday, it even has its own baseball team -- we laugh that its players are apparently on company payroll (alas, the photo below is not from Sunday, when the Samsung Lions got crushed by the LG Twins -- the score was 12 - 3 when we left at the bottom of the seventh inning).

With Tyler at his Samsung "indoctrination camp" (as it's become lovingly referred to by the wives), I decide to spend my morning learning a bit more about the company whose ranks we just joined.  Here's what I learned -- well, the interesting stuff, anyway.  Perhaps my favorite fun fact is that Samsung apparently hires psychologists to to select K-pop music to help relieve stress in Samsung's flagship mobile manufacturing complex in Gumi! (click here for my current favorite K-pop song; thanks Jeanne!)

Samsung was founded by Lee Byung-chul in 1938 as a trading company that specialized in selling local groceries and produced noodles as its flagship product.  The name "Samsung" means "three stars", the word "three" connoting "big, numerous, and powerful" and "stars" connoting "eternity."

Over the next thirty years, Samsung diversified beyond trading into food processing, textiles, insurance, securities, and retail.  It wasn't until the late 1960s that Samsung entered the electronics industry.  Samsung Electronics was established in 1969 and released its first product in 1970: a 12-inch black-and-white tv.

In the 1970s, Samsung entered the shipbuilding and construction industries, which, along with Samsung Electronics, would drive its subsequent growth.  I was intrigued to learn that the Samsung Engineering and Construction Group helped build the tallest building in the world: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Samsung's first mobile device was a car phone introduced in 1986.  Now the majority of last quarter's $8.27 billion profit is attributed to smart phone sales.

As I'm learning from bits of corporate culture leaked on Facebook this week from training, innovation is clearly a big focus (with its 100,000 patents), and innovation and quality loom large in corporate lore.  Unhappy with Samsung's electronics division, Chairman Lee Kun-hee supposedly went on a three-day rant in Germany, dubbed the "Frankfurt Declaration of 1993" and turned this into a management book of guiding principles for the company.  One of his famous quotes is: "Change everything but your wife and children."

Two years later, one of Samsung's first mobile phones apparently did not work when it first came out.  According to corporate legend, when Lee Kun-hee found out, he visited the factory where the phones were made and invited employees to the courtyard as he burned the entire inventory, worth over $50 million.

Though the company was headed near bankruptcy with the Asian financial crisis of 1997, it survived that and went on to become the largest company in South Korea.  As they say, the rest is history.  Samsung Electronics is now the flagship subsidiary of the Samsung Group, accounting for 70% of the group's revenue in 2012.  It employs over 370,000 workers worldwide (compared to Apple -- estimated 80,000 and Microsoft -- estimated 98,000).  With its focus on innovation, it spent over $10.8 billion on R&D in 2012 and last year, captured the largest market share (31%) of the global smartphone segment.  It apparently claims to have successfully tested its new 5G wireless network, saying technology will be "up to several hundred times faster" and will be available for launch in 2020.

Its other businesses are substantial in their own right.  Samsung Heavy Industries is the world's second largest shipbuilder.  There's also Samsung Engineering, Samsung Construction, Samsung Techwin (an aerospace, surveillance, and defense company), Cheil Worldwide (the world's 15th largest advertising agency by revenue, who knew?), and numerous others.  Dubbed the "Miracle on the Han River", Samsung's revenue is equal to 17% of South Korea's $1,082 billion GDP.

The big current news, of course, is that Samsung's Chairman Lee Kun-hee (of "Change everything but your wife and children" fame) has been in the hospital since May of this year.  Aged 72, he had a heart attack and as of last month, was entering his third month at the hospital.  As a family business, he took over from his father 27 years ago and brought Samsung to where it is today.  Reports from The Wall Street Journal claim that his son, 46-year-old Lee Jae Yong will struggle to keep the same influence, due to waning support in Korea for conglomerates controlled through crossholdings, along with inheritance taxes that could exceed $5 billion.  Though the family owns less than 2 percent of total stock, the Lees apparently hold tremendous power over Samsung Group's 74 companies through a web of share holdings.  Will be interesting to follow this in the years ahead.

So where does Tyler fit in with all of this?  In 1997, Chairman Lee Kun-hee started Samsung's Global Strategy Group (GSG) to accelerate the globalization of Samsung and provide support as a strategic partner to Samsung affiliates (essentially serving as internal consultants).  Learning more about corporate history, it now makes sense this started in the wake of the Asian financial crisis, with Asian companies looking outward for opportunities of globalization and growth.  Interestingly, the group is only foreigners (even Korean-Americans are supposedly not considered for the role).  In a statement introducing the group, the Chairman announced: "We need high caliber global talent who can reveal to us a fresh perspective on trends and the latest information.  Let us develop talent to become global managers abroad by familiarizing them with Samsung through a two to three year posting in the Chairman's Office."  

This year's class of 51 global strategists is the group's largest so far (poor Clara, who is managing all the logistics, seems to go back and forth to sort out visa and registration issues every week!)  As we're learning, we seem to be connected with Tyler's new colleagues by about two degrees of separation; everyone seems to have friends in common, which is nice when moving across the world.  While the group prides itself on geographic diversity, just about everyone is from Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Stanford, London Business School, and all the usual suspects.  There's lots of truth in the statement we joke about: this is Business School Part 2.

And so from a selfish perspective, what does all of this mean for me?  I'm an iPhone user in a Samsung world.  I moved here with all intents to keep my iPhone -- I like to think it's from my independent streak, but really I'm just a creature of habit.  But now the darn camera seems to freeze at the worst possible of times, like asking someone to take a whole big group picture.  Ever trying to be helpful, the person with my phone always seems to say: "Hmm, maybe you should get a Samsung."  

For the first time, I may just consider it.

--------------------
PS: As if on cue, The Verge just published this article yesterday (posted by a GSG'er on Facebook today): Samsung is apparently making a musical sitcom about how cool it is to work there.  Catching up with ever popular Korean dramas, the upcoming "musicom" called "Best Future" will: "explore young people's dreams and challenges over the course of six 10-minute long episodes", through the performance of popular covers of pop '80s and '90s tunes.  Think Glee meets Samsung.

The article only gets better: "In order to portray the 'real' Samsung, the series will be shot at company offices in both Seoul and Suwon Digital City.  The idea behind "Best Future" is to weave a tale about work, life, and relationships that those in their 20s and 30s can sympathize with, and to tempt prospective employees into working with Samsung."  You can't make this stuff up.

So now the gig's up.  You guys now know the real reason Tyler was recruited here... all those nights diligently practicing karaoke have finally paid of.