Byung-Chull Lee is founder and chairman of Korea’s oldest and largest trading company. Today Samsung, meaning three stars, is the umbrella for a 27-company conglomerate which includes Seoul’s finest department store, one of the largest newspapers and broadcast companies, paper factories, life insurance, an electronics firm, and numerous ventures with such United States corporations as Corning Glass Works and General Telephone and Electronics Corporation. Samsung Petrochemical, a joint venture with AMOCO Chemical and Mitsui Petrochemicals, opened last year along with shipbuilding and construction operations.

Mr. Lee’s philosophy for establishing a new business is to “pounce on it when the market is at rock bottom.” The son of a Confucian scholar, Lee left Japan’s Waseda University in 1934 to open a tiny rice-cleaning plant in the small Korean city of Masan. It did not take long for the 25-year old Mr. Lee to notice that all of the competitors were making deliveries by slow ox cart. Therefore, he bought a truck and soon left the competition in his dust, and as he recalls, “howling blue murder.”

As the profits grew from his rice-cleaning mill, Lee moved into flour processing, Sake brewing, and real estate speculation. Then came the years of war and chaos for merchants and manufacturers in the Orient. In 1952, following the Korean War, Lee opened what is now the cornerstone of his export-import business, Samsung Company, Ltd., stating that South Korea “could not only profit through trade.”

In 1977 Samsung Group, with sales around $1.2 billion, accounted for four percent of South Korea’s GNP. Taxes from the conglomerate paid for 3.4 percent of the country’s budget and its export sales accounted for six percent of the country’s total. B.C. Lee’s Samsung Group is one of three large companies which have emerged to make tiny South Korea an economic success, and even a competitive threat to Japan, in the world marketplace.