Reading Korea's Economic History through Its Companies

Doosan is Korea's oldest surviving company, tracing its start to the Park Seung-jik Store, a dry-goods shop opened in Jongno, Seoul, in 1896 during the open-port era. After Liberation it grew through consumer businesses, including beer (Oriental Brewery, OB Beer).

Around the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Doosan sold off its food and consumer divisions and reshaped itself into a heavy-industry group centered on power equipment and construction machinery. Its 2001 acquisition of Korea Heavy Industries (today Doosan Enerbility) symbolized this shift.

Yuhan was a pharmaceutical company founded in Gyeongseong in 1926 by Yu Il-han, who had returned from the United States. It first imported American medicines, then developed domestic drugs such as the pain reliever Antiphlamine in 1933. It is regarded as a leading national enterprise of the Japanese colonial period.

Believing that corporate profit belongs to society, Yu Il-han introduced employee share ownership and professional management, and at his death in 1971 his will gave his entire fortune to social and educational causes. This business ethic still defines Yuhan today.

The life of founder Yu Il-han is itself a story of overseas Koreans. He crossed to the United States alone at age nine in 1904, worked his way through the University of Michigan, and in 1922 co-founded La Choy, a canned bean-sprout food company, whose success funded the company he founded upon returning home — Yuhan. He was also an independence activist: in 1945, at age fifty, he joined the U.S. OSS's Napko Project, a plan to infiltrate Korea, as leader of its first unit and underwent special training (the war ended with Japan's surrender before it was carried out).

Samsung began with Samsung Sanghoe, founded by Lee Byung-chul in Daegu in 1938. After the Korean War it built Cheil Jedang (1953) and Cheil Wool Textile (1954), growing through import-substituting manufacturing in sugar and textiles—a leading example of the 1950s 'three whites' industries (sugar, flour, and cotton textiles).

In 1969 it founded Samsung Electronics to enter the electronics industry, and after acquiring Korea Semiconductor in 1974, Lee Byung-chul's 1983 'February 8 Tokyo Declaration' committed the group to large-scale semiconductor investment, eventually making it the world leader in memory chips.

At the seed of Samsung's semiconductor business is a Korean-American scientist. Korea Semiconductor, which Samsung acquired in 1974, had been founded in Bucheon by Dr. Kang Ki-dong, who studied semiconductors at Ohio State University and worked at Motorola before returning to Korea. Planted on barren ground with skills learned in America, that seed grew through acquisition and investment into today's world leader in memory chips.

Hyundai began with Hyundai Civil Works, founded by Chung Ju-yung in 1947 (rooted in the 1946 Hyundai Auto Repair Shop). Growing through construction, Hyundai took a leading role in building the Gyeongbu Expressway (1968–1970), part of the government's expansion of social infrastructure.

By breaking ground on a shipyard in Ulsan in 1972 to become a world-class shipbuilder and by building up the auto industry through Hyundai Motor (founded 1967), Hyundai became a group emblematic of the government-led heavy and chemical industrialization of the 1970s. In the 2000s it split into separate groups such as Hyundai Motor and HD Hyundai.

Chung Ju-yung was a displaced person from Tongcheon in Gangwon Province (now in North Korea), famous for having left home as a boy with money from his father's sale of a cow. In 1998, at eighty-three, saying he would repay that cow a thousandfold, he led 1,001 cattle across Panmunjom on two visits to the North — the first civilian crossing at Panmunjom since the division, remembered for opening the way to inter-Korean exchanges such as the Mount Kumgang tours.

LG began with Lak Hui Chemical, founded by Koo In-hwoi in Busan in 1947. After growing through cosmetics (Lucky Cream) and plastics, it founded GoldStar in 1958 to enter electronics and produced the A-501, Korea's first domestic radio, in 1959.

It went on to grow on the twin pillars of chemicals and electronics, changing its name from Lucky-Goldstar to LG in 1995. In 2005 the GS Group was spun off.

In November 1962 GoldStar shipped 62 radios to New York — the first export of Korean-made electronics. From those modest 62 sets, the path led to the GoldStar name in global home electronics and to today's LG brand.

Lotte began with Lotte Co., founded in Tokyo in 1948 by Shin Kyuk-ho, a Korean resident of Japan. After succeeding in Japan with gum and confectionery, he entered his homeland by founding Lotte Confectionery in 1967, following the 1965 normalization of Korea–Japan relations.

Lotte then expanded into retail such as department stores and marts, along with hotels and tourism, growing into a leading Korean retail group, and in 2017 it opened the 123-floor Lotte World Tower in Seoul.

The name 'Lotte' carries the literary spirit of a young Korean in Japan. Shin Kyuk-ho, who paid his way through night classes at Waseda Jitsugyo School by delivering newspapers and milk, was moved by Charlotte, the heroine of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, and in 1948 named his company Lotte in the hope that it would be loved by everyone.

Hanwha began as Korea Explosives (Hanguk Hwayak), founded in 1952 by Kim Chong-hee. In the aftermath of the Korean War it localized the industrial explosives the country lacked, supplying basic materials for mining and construction and supporting the infrastructure building of the postwar recovery and the economic development plan era.

The group later expanded into petrochemicals, machinery, and finance, and changed its name to Hanwha in 1993. Since the 2000s it has diversified into renewable energy such as solar power, the defense industry, shipbuilding, and space launch vehicles.

Cheil Jedang, the root of CJ, was founded in 1953 as Samsung's first manufacturing company, supplying postwar society with staples such as sugar and flour — goods of the so-called 'three whites' industries (sugar, flour, and cotton textiles). It was a leading example of the 1950s drive to domestically produce consumer goods that had depended on aid supplies.

Beginning in the 1990s it separated from the Samsung Group, becoming fully independent in 1997, and later expanded beyond food and bio into cultural industries such as film and broadcasting.

Taking Korean food global is another CJ story. Bibigo dumplings, launched in the U.S. in 2010, kept the Korean word 'Mandu' as their brand rather than 'dumpling,' and by around 2019 overtook the Chinese-American brand that had led the market for 25 years to become No. 1 in North American frozen dumplings. In film, Parasite — invested in and distributed by CJ — swept four Academy Awards in 2020, including the first Best Picture ever for a non-English-language film, the fruit of long investment in the cultural industries.

SK started as Sunkyong Textiles, which Chey Jong-gun rebuilt in 1953 from a factory left in ruins by the war. After building its base in textiles and chemicals during the export-driven growth period, it expanded into oil refining and petrochemicals by acquiring the Korea Oil Corporation (Yukong) in 1980, and into telecommunications by acquiring Korea Mobile Telecommunications in 1994. In 1974, when Korea's per-capita income was still in the hundreds of dollars, second chairman Chey Jong-hyon endowed the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies with his own funds to support study at the world's leading universities — scholars who became deep roots of the overseas Korean academic community.

In 2012 it acquired Hynix Semiconductor, making chips a new pillar. Its shift from textiles to energy, telecom, and semiconductors parallels the broader movement of Korea's industrial structure from light industry toward heavy-chemical and high-tech industries.

SK hynix traces its roots to Hyundai Electronics, founded in 1983. Under the government-led restructuring that followed the 1997 financial crisis (the so-called 'Big Deals'), it absorbed LG Semicon in 1999, was renamed Hynix Semiconductor in 2001 as it was separated from the Hyundai group, and was acquired by SK in 2012. The changing ownership of this one chipmaker captures the reshaping of Korean industry around the financial crisis.

At twenty, in 1937, Shin Yong-ho crossed into Manchuria and built a business base in grain trading across Dalian and Beijing. By twenty-four he had founded Bukil Company in Beijing, chartering trucks himself to build a distribution network across the countryside's grain belt. At Liberation, he abandoned everything he had built over a decade and returned to Korea empty-handed.

Shin, who missed school entirely after a childhood bout of tuberculosis, taught himself through a self-imposed "thousand days of reading." Believing education was the nation's future in a country left in ruins by war, he invented the world's first education insurance and founded Korea Education Insurance in 1958. The Gwanghwamun glpan, the changing seasonal message displayed on the company's headquarters, has become one of Seoul's most beloved street sights.

Pohang Iron and Steel (POSCO) was established in 1968 as a state-owned enterprise under government initiative, with Park Tae-joon as its first president. Part of the construction funding came from the claims funds (daeil cheonggweon jageum) received through the normalization of Korea–Japan relations, making the integrated steelworks a symbol of the heavy-and-chemical industrialization policy at a time when capital and technology were scarce. Park Tae-joon drove the construction with the 'right-face' (uhyanghu) resolve that if a steelworks built with what he called the blood money of their ancestors failed, its builders would turn right and walk into Yeongil Bay — a spirit that became the founding creed of jecheol boguk, 'steel to serve the nation.'

After completing its first Pohang phase in 1973, it built the Gwangyang works and grew into a world-scale steelmaker, and was privatized in 2000. Its cheap, stable supply of steel became a foundation for downstream industries such as automobiles, shipbuilding, and construction.

NAVER began in 1997 as an in-house venture at Samsung SDS and was spun off in 1999 by Lee Hae-jin as Naver Comm. It grew amid the venture-startup boom that followed the 1997 financial crisis and rose to become the top search service in Korea through user-participation features such as 'Knowledge iN.'

It later merged with the game company Hangame to form NHN before splitting off again, and expanded overseas through services like LINE and Webtoon. NAVER's emergence shows how the information-technology industry took root as a new pillar of a Korean economy that had centered on manufacturing.

LINE was born of a disaster. When the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake knocked out calls and texts, NAVER's team in Japan released a messenger that June built around staying connected with the people closest to you. LINE gained fifty million users within 300 days of launch and became Japan's everyday messenger; in 2024, Webtoon Entertainment became the first Korean content company to list on the U.S. Nasdaq.

Kakao traces its roots to KakaoTalk, a mobile messenger launched in 2010 by Kim Beom-su. After winning users with a free messenger during the rapid spread of smartphones, it expanded into payments, finance, and content.

Kim Beom-su was a first-generation venture entrepreneur who had earlier founded Hangame in 1998 and set up IWILAB in 2006; in 2014 Kakao merged with Daum Communications, which had been established in 1995. Kakao's growth illustrates the venture-and-mobile era that followed the financial crisis.

Kakao's overseas story was written in Japan, the homeland of comics. Piccoma, a comics platform launched in 2016, grew on Korean-style webtoons and a 'wait-and-it's-free' model to become Japan's top-grossing comics app from 2020 — a reversal in which a Korean company's platform leads the market in manga's birthplace.