Samsung

Born in 1910 to a landowning family in Uiryeong, Korea, Lee Byung-chul studied economics at Waseda University in Tokyo but left before graduating. In 1938 he founded Samsung as a small trading company in Daegu, exporting dried fish, vegetables, and fruit. After the Korean War, he steered the group into industrial diversification — launching Cheil Jedang (sugar refining), Cheil Industries (textiles), and, in 1969, Samsung Electronics, which would become the group's crown jewel. His deep conviction that human capital outweighed all other assets — captured in his maxim "a company is its people" — led him to establish one of Korea's first systematic corporate recruiting and training programs, a legacy that shaped Samsung's engineering-driven culture for decades after his death in 1987.