5.05.2005
An overview of Samsung
Seoul Machine
From the article:
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From the article:
- At Lee's command, the factory's 2,000 employees donned headbands labeled Quality First and assembled in a courtyard. There they found their entire inventory piled in a heap - cell phones, fax machines, nearly $50 million worth of equipment. A banner before them read Quality Is My Pride. Beneath it sat Lee and his board of directors. Ten workers took the products one by one, smashed them with hammers, and threw them into a bonfire. Before it was over, employees were weeping.
Ritual purification at the command of a heroic leader is an ancient and powerful tradition in this part of the world. With a few superficial changes, this whole scene could have played in a Zhang Yimou costume epic. Certainly it had the desired effect: After Lee's visit to Gumi, shoddiness was not an option. Ki-tae Lee, then the Gumi factory manager and now head of Samsung's mobile telecom division, personally tests new models by hurling them against a wall or dropping them from a second-story window. Once he even ran over a handset with his car. It still worked.
Kun-hee Lee's ambition was straightforward: He wanted to transform his company into the world's top consumer electronics brand - the place that makes the coolest stuff.
A decade later, he's just about done it. Samsung is ranked number 21 among the world's top brands by the consulting outfit Interbrand, just one notch below Sony. In sales, Samsung has shot to number three behind Matsushita and Sony in consumer electronics and is fighting Motorola for the number two spot behind Nokia in cell phones. Samsung is also the world's leading manufacturer of flash memory and flat-panel screens, two of the core technologies of the digital era. And it's the most profitable tech enterprise on the planet, with a cool $10 billion in earnings last year - more even than Microsoft.
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