Samsung

Lee Byung-chul founded Samsung — meaning "three stars" in Korean — in 1938 in Suwon, South Korea as a small trading company selling dried fish, vegetables, and noodles. The company had 40 employees. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Lee expanded into sugar refining, wool, and insurance in the 1940s and 1950s, building Samsung into one of Korea's first major conglomerates — known as a chaebol — through relationships with the postwar South Korean government.

Samsung entered the electronics business in 1969, initially making black-and-white televisions under licence from Japanese manufacturers. The South Korean government's industrial policy actively supported chaebol expansion into strategic industries, providing cheap loans and trade protection. Samsung Electronics grew rapidly by producing consumer electronics for export — initially as an OEM manufacturer for foreign brands. The relationship between Samsung and the South Korean state has remained close and occasionally controversial ever since.

Lee Byung-chul announced Samsung would enter the semiconductor business in 1983 — a decision that Korean banking analysts considered reckless. Samsung had no semiconductor expertise, no technology, and would be competing against Japanese and American companies with decades of advantage. Lee invested $100 million of his personal fortune and sent engineers to study American chip manufacturers. Within a decade, Samsung was the world's largest producer of DRAM memory chips. The bet became one of the most successful industrial strategy decisions in economic history.

Samsung had manufactured components for Apple — processors, displays, and memory — since the original iPhone. In 2010, Samsung launched the Galaxy S smartphone directly competing with the iPhone, while remaining Apple's largest supplier. The two companies spent years simultaneously as each other's biggest customer and biggest competitor. In 2016, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note 7 to acclaim — until batteries began catching fire. Samsung recalled 2.5 million devices, replaced them, then recalled the replacements when they also caught fire. Airlines banned the Note 7. Samsung permanently discontinued it, writing off $5.3 billion. CEO Lee Jae-yong was arrested on bribery charges months later.

Samsung reported full-year 2025 revenues of KRW 333.6 trillion — approximately $230 billion — and operating profit of KRW 43.6 trillion, up 33% from 2024. The Q4 2025 performance was historic: quarterly revenue of KRW 93.8 trillion and operating profit of KRW 20.1 trillion — tripling year-on-year — driven by surging AI data center demand for memory chips. Samsung's chip division alone generated KRW 16.4 trillion in Q4 operating profit. Samsung had finally received Nvidia approval for its HBM3E high-bandwidth memory chips after lagging behind SK Hynix, and had begun sampling its next-generation HBM4. The company that had started selling dried fish in 1938 was now the world's largest memory chip manufacturer, supplying the AI infrastructure that was remaking the global economy.