Translated from the original Spanish article. Read in Spanish
Your phone is made by a company… that used to sell dried fish. Before TVs, chips and foldable phones, Samsung was a small trading shop in Korea.
A shop in Daegu
Korea, 1938. Lee Byung-chul opens a small trading business in the city of Daegu. It sold dried fish, fruit, vegetables… and noodles they made themselves.
He called it Samsung, which means "three stars" in Korean.
Over the years, the business grew and Lee moved its base from Daegu to Seoul. Samsung stopped being a shop and became a group of companies spanning many sectors.
From fish to electronics
In 1969 it made the leap that changed everything: it went into electronics. Its first big product was a black-and-white television.
It was a risky bet. Korea was still a developing country, and competing with the big brands from Japan and the United States seemed impossible. But Samsung started manufacturing, learning and growing.
"Samsung" means "three stars" in Korean.
The son who wanted to change everything
When Lee Byung-chul died, his son Lee Kun-hee became, within weeks, the group's second chairman. And he didn't like what he saw: Samsung sold a lot, but many of its products had a reputation for being cheap and poor quality.
In 1993 he gathered some 200 executives in Frankfurt, Germany, and spoke to them for about three days. That meeting is known as the "Frankfurt Declaration", and it gave rise to the "New Management" idea: stop competing on quantity and start competing on quality.
The phone bonfire
But in the 1990s, its phones were still failing. In March 1995, Lee Kun-hee learned about the poor quality of the brand's Anycall phones and made a decision no one forgot.
He had about 150,000 defective devices gathered up, worth about 50 billion won (more than 40 million dollars at the time), and set them on fire in front of some two thousand employees.
In 1995, Samsung burned about 150,000 defective phones in front of its employees.
The message was crystal clear: a bad product isn't sold, it's destroyed. From that day on, quality became an obsession inside the company.
From shame to leadership
That bonfire became an internal legend. Samsung invested in design, in its own technology and in making its own parts, such as screens and memory chips.
Today Samsung is one of the world's largest phone makers, and its screens and chips are inside many other brands' devices.
From a dried-fish shop in Daegu… to your pocket.
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Sources (in Spanish)
- Historia de la empresa: Wikipedia, Samsung, y GSMArena, «From seafood trader to global technology powerhouse».
- El fundador: Wikipedia, Lee Byung-chul.
- Declaración de Frankfurt (1993) y la hoguera de teléfonos Anycall (1995): The Korea Herald y TechCrunch, «How Samsung Got Big».
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