Inside Samsung’s uncertain future

Inside Samsung’s uncertain future

With the death of its chairman and with his successor on trial for bribery and fraud, where does the South Korean technology behemoth go next?

Words: Tom Ward

By the late 1980s, Samsung had been a company for over fifty years. And things were getting stale. The story goes that after he took over as chairman in 1987, Lee Kun-hee, the third son of the company’s founder, gathered together his employees told them “Let’s change everything except our wives and kids”, then led the company in a mass bonfire of 150,000 mobile phone handsets.

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