What if I told you that the phone in your pocket, the TV on your wall, and the very memory chips that power our digital world can all be traced back to a small shop selling dried fish and noodles? It sounds impossible, but it’s the true story of Samsung. This is a company that didn’t just enter the market; it redefined it. It’s a company with more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined. A company that, in the first quarter of 2025, shipped over 60 million phones, capturing a 20% share of the entire global market.
How did a humble Korean trading post, founded in the ashes of war, grow into a global empire that dictates the terms of modern technology? This isn’t just a story about success. It’s a story about relentless ambition, ruthless strategy, and a series of make-or-break pivots that risked it all to gain… well, everything.
This is the story of how Samsung, a name that means “Three Stars,” reached for a galaxy of its own and ended up conquering the world. It’s a journey that begins not in a pristine Silicon Valley lab, but in a dusty corner of Taegu, Korea, in 1938, with a 28-year-old entrepreneur and a vision that seemed impossibly grand.
The Seed (Humble Beginnings)
Our story starts with a man named Lee Byung-chul. Born in 1910 to a wealthy land-owning family, he was given the rare privilege of a university education in Tokyo. There, he saw Japan’s industrial advancements and modern business practices, which planted a seed. Forced to return home after his father’s death, Lee didn’t just settle for managing the family estate. He saw a nation, Korea, under Japanese rule, with an uncertain but potential-filled future. He wanted to build something that would not only be a successful business but also contribute to his country’s economic future.
In 1938, with just 30,000 won in his pocket, Lee Byung-chul started a small trading company in the city of Taegu. He called it Samsung Sanghoe. The name, Samsung, translates to “Three Stars” in Korean. Lee’s vision was for the company to one day become powerful and everlasting, like the stars in the sky. At the time, this vision must have seemed absurd. His business was anything but glamorous. With a team of just 40 employees, Samsung dealt in locally grown groceries, dried Korean fish, and its own noodles. The company’s main business was exporting these goods to China. It was a simple, practical business, born from the necessities of the time.
The backdrop to this story is critical. Korea was a nation grappling with conflict and poverty. In the years after Samsung’s founding, it would endure the Second World War and the devastating Korean War, which left the country in ruins. But for a driven entrepreneur like Lee, chaos was also an opportunity. He didn’t just survive the turmoil; he thrived in it. When the Korean War broke out, his company, which had already expanded, prospered. This early success was a testament to Lee’s resilience and his uncanny ability to navigate turbulent waters—a trait that would come to define Samsung for the next century.
The First Pivot (From Trading to Making)
The end of the Korean War in 1953 marked a new beginning for South Korea, and for Samsung. The country was focused on rebuilding, and its government actively supported industrialization. It implemented protectionist policies designed to help large domestic conglomerates, known as chaebol, by shielding them from foreign competition and providing easy financing. Samsung was perfectly positioned to benefit. Lee Byung-chul understood that the future of his company, and his country, lay not just in trading goods, but in making them. This was Samsung’s first great pivot.
Leaving groceries and noodles behind as his main focus, Lee expanded aggressively into manufacturing. In 1953, he established Cheil Sugar, which became South Korea’s first large-scale sugar refinery. A year later, he founded Cheil Mojik and built the largest woolen mill in the country. It was a strategic move, diversifying into industries that were fundamental to a developing nation. Samsung was no longer just a trading company; it was a creator of essential goods.
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the “Three Stars” of Samsung began to multiply. The company moved into finance, acquiring banks and insurance companies. It entered the retail space, opening its own department store. This rapid diversification was a hallmark of the chaebol model, creating a web of interconnected businesses all under one family’s control. Lee’s management style was autocratic and perfectionist; he demanded the highest standards of quality and efficiency from his employees, creating a culture of excellence that was critical to its rapid growth. His vision was no longer just about building a successful company; it was about patriotic industrial service—a mission to help develop South Korea from the ground up. This first pivot, from a simple trading company to a manufacturing giant, laid the financial and structural foundation for everything that was to come. But it was the next pivot that would catapult Samsung from a national hero into a global force.
The Game-Changing Pivot (The Leap into the Future)
By the late 1960s, Samsung was a powerful force in South Korea, but its name meant little to the rest of the world. Lee Byung-chul, ever the visionary, knew that the future wasn’t in textiles or sugar. It was in electronics. In what was perhaps the company’s most audacious and consequential decision, Samsung plunged into the electronics industry. On January 13, 1969, Samsung Electronics was officially born.
This was an enormous gamble. At the time, the electronics industry was dominated by established giants from Japan and the United States. Samsung had no technology, limited resources, and almost no experience. To get started, they had to cooperate with Japanese companies like Sanyo and NEC, a move that sparked public outcry in a nation with a painful history of Japanese occupation. Samsung had to promise the government it would focus exclusively on exports to get the venture off the ground. The company sent trainees to Japan to learn everything they could, from making radio condensers to understanding vacuum tubes.
The first product to roll off their assembly line was a simple 12-inch black-and-white television in 1970. It was a humble beginning, but it was a start. Throughout the 1970s, the company steadily expanded its portfolio, producing refrigerators, washing machines, and color TVs for export. But Lee Byung-chul and his son, Lee Kun-hee, who was being groomed to take over, weren’t content with just assembling products using foreign components. They understood a fundamental truth: to truly lead, you must control the technology at the core of your products.
This realization led to the second, and even more critical, part of this pivot. In 1974, Samsung acquired a 50% stake in Korea Semiconductor, a struggling company that was one of the first to attempt chip-making in the country. Then, in 1983, Lee Byung-chul made a monumental announcement in Tokyo, declaring that Samsung was going all-in on the production of DRAM—Dynamic Random-Access Memory—the memory chips that are the building blocks of the digital world. The world was skeptical. The investment required was astronomical, and Samsung was decades behind its competitors. But Lee was undeterred. He and his son invested billions, building massive fabrication plants.
This wasn’t just a business decision; it was a declaration of war on the existing tech hierarchy. Samsung was betting the entire company on its ability to not just catch up with, but to surpass, the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers. It was this all-or-nothing bet on controlling the very heart of technology—the semiconductor—that would ultimately give Samsung the keys to the kingdom.
The Final Conquest (Dominating the Market)
The 1980s and 90s were a period of intense, almost fanatical, transformation. After Lee Byung-chul’s death in 1987, his son Lee Kun-hee took the helm. He was convinced Samsung had grown complacent and was unprepared for true global competition. He famously gathered his executives and delivered a blistering mandate: “Change everything but your wife and kids.” This “New Management” philosophy injected a sense of perpetual crisis and urgency into the company, pushing it toward radical innovation and a focus on quality over quantity.
The massive bet on semiconductors began to pay off spectacularly. By 1992, Samsung had become the world’s largest producer of memory chips, a position it held for most of the three decades since. This dominance in components became their secret weapon. They were now the suppliers to their biggest rivals, including companies like Apple, who would later rely on Samsung’s chips for their earliest iPhones. Samsung was playing both sides of the field—powering the competition’s products while simultaneously building its own.
With control over the most critical components, Samsung’s rise in consumer electronics was meteoric. They became a leader in display technology, producing the world’s first digital TV in 1998. Throughout the 2000s, Samsung televisions, known for their brilliant displays and sleek designs, became the best-selling in the world, a title the company has held since 2006. But the final conquest, the one that would make Samsung a household name on par with any in the world, was yet to come.
When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it changed the world. Many companies tried to respond, but most failed. Samsung, however, saw its moment. Leveraging its immense manufacturing scale, its mastery of components like processors and OLED screens, and its now-ingrained culture of rapid innovation, Samsung launched its first Galaxy smartphone in 2009. The Galaxy S series, which followed, became the definitive rival to the iPhone. The battle was fierce, a global war fought through patents, marketing campaigns, and relentless innovation.
Samsung’s strategy was to offer something for everyone. Unlike Apple’s focused lineup, Samsung released a vast range of phones, from affordable A-series devices to cutting-edge flagships. They pioneered new categories, like the large-screen “phablet” with the Galaxy Note and, more recently, have come to dominate the emerging market for foldable phones. To add a dose of authenticity to their journey, they’ve faced and overcome significant setbacks, most notably the global recall of the Galaxy Note 7 due to battery issues, a crisis that tested their reputation but ultimately proved their resilience. This relentless assault on the market worked. Samsung became a true giant in the mobile world.
Samsung’s story is a masterclass in strategy and ambition. From noodles to semiconductors, their journey shows how bold pivots can redefine an entire industry. But Samsung isn’t the only company with a story like this. What other brands have a fascinating “zero to hero” story you’d like to see us cover? Let us know in the comments below. And if you’re finding this story of ambition as incredible as we do, make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don’t miss our next deep dive.
The Legacy (The Keys to the Kingdom)
Today, the empire founded on dried fish is almost incomprehensibly vast. Samsung operates in nearly every corner of the globe, employing hundreds of thousands of people. Its business philosophy is simple: devote its talent and technology to creating superior products and services that contribute to a better global society.
So what are the true keys to Samsung’s kingdom?
First, is its strategy of vertical integration. By manufacturing its own key components—from the memory chips and processors to the stunning display panels—Samsung controls its own destiny. This gives it an incredible advantage in cost, quality control, and the speed of innovation.
Second, is its relentless and almost obsessive focus on research and development. Samsung consistently ranks as one of the world’s top companies for R&D spending, holding tens of thousands of patents in the U.S. alone. This commitment is visible in their constant push into new frontiers, like the development of the world’s first 3nm microfabrication technology, a breakthrough in semiconductor engineering.
Third, is a culture of adaptation and “creative destruction.” From Lee Byung-chul’s first pivot into manufacturing to Lee Kun-hee’s command to “change everything,” Samsung has never been afraid to upend its own success in pursuit of the next big thing. This philosophy continues today. The company isn’t just resting on its smartphone laurels; it’s aggressively investing in the technologies that will define the next century: artificial intelligence, 5G and 6G networks, IoT, and even green hydrogen and automotive technology.
From a small trading company founded in 1938, Samsung has evolved into a global symbol of South Korea’s own miraculous economic transformation. The three stars in its name were meant to signify a company that was large, strong, and eternal. Looking at the global landscape today—a landscape powered by its chips, illuminated by its screens, and connected by its devices—it’s clear that Lee Byung-chul’s humble vision didn’t just come true. It reshaped our world.
