Lee Kun-Hee, chairman of Samsung Electronics, arrives for a company meeting at the Shilla Hotel in ... [+]
Lee Kun-hee, the ailing chief of the sprawling Samsung empire, has died in Seoul on Sunday, the company announced. He was 78. The second-generation heir of South Korea’s largest conglomerate had been in a coma following a heart attack in 2014.
Lee was surrounded by his family at the time of his death, including Jay Y. Lee, his only son and vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, the company added.
South Korea’s richest man since 2009, Lee took over the reigns since the death of his father and the conglomerate’s founder, Lee Byung-chull, in 1987, who handpicked him as his successor not long before his death.
Lee is perhaps most famous for telling his executives to “change everything but your wife and kids,” in a 1993 declaration, when he announced management reforms. With nearly three decades at the helm, Lee transformed Samsung into the leading manufacturer of smartphones, smart TVs and memory chips.
“Lee was a master of careful, cautious and shrewd decision-making,” says Geoffrey Cain, who wrote a book on Samsung. Suffering from lung cancer when he made “the incredibly risky decision in 1983 to enter semiconductors,” Cain says, “allowed Samsung to turn Korea into a Republic of Samsung.”
Lee’s son, Jay Y. Lee, has been the de-facto head of the empire, and has been mired in a controversial presidential scandal that has rocked Korea since late 2016. He was incarcerated for nearly a year before being released in February 2018 and is now undergoing yet another trial tied to the scandal, facing charges of accounting fraud and stock manipulation. Similarly, the elder Lee was convicted twice of charges related to bribery and tax evasion, among other white-collar crimes, but was twice pardoned by the sitting president.
The Lee family topped Forbes Asia’s richest families list for two consecutive years, since the inaugural ranking in 2015. As of last year, revenues at the Samsung group were equivalent to 20% of South Korea’s economy.
As of today, Lee Kun-hee’s net worth was estimated at $20 billion; he is survived by his wife, Hong Ra-hee, his son and his two daughters, Lee Boo-jin and Lee Seo-hyun who have also been involved in the business; each of the family members are individual billionaires.
Lee’s death will raise questions related to inheritance matters; Samsung did not announce succession plans for its chairman, who was the largest individual shareholder of Samsung Electronics, which makes up the bulk of his wealth. Traditionally, shares held by South Korea’s richest people have been inherited by family members following death. The country’s inheritance tax is around 60%.
