Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee plans to host a New Year’s dinner gathering for president-level executives on Jan 9, which also marks his 72nd birthday

January 12, 2014 Leave a comment

2014-01-09 11:18

Samsung chairman to host gathering with staff

Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee plans to host a New Year’s dinner gathering for president-level executives Thursday, which also marks his 72nd birthday.

  • The country’s richest man has invited senior Samsung executives to his birthday celebrations since 2008.  Lee’s remarks are often closely watched as they can set the tone not just for South Korea’s largest market-cap conglomerate he inherited from his father but also for the entire business community.

Lee will attend a separate ceremony prior to the dinner to award dedicated employees, company officials said.Hong Ra-hee, Lee’s wife and the director of the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, is expected to accompany the chairman as well as their only son and heir-apparent Lee Jay-yong.
Their two daughters — Lee Boo-jin, head of Hotel Shilla Co., and Lee Seo-hyun, head of fashion division in Samsung Everland Inc. — are also expected to attend the dinner event, company officials said.
This year, Samsung has expanded the invite list to include vice-president level executives and their spouses in an apparent bid to bolster ties among employees amid the prolonged economic challenges from home and abroad.
The annual “Samsung Award of Honor” ceremony was established in 1994 to recognize dedicated workers in commemoration of Samsung’s so-called New Management Initiative, the conglomerate’s key business strategy announced in 1993.
One of Lee’s most famous lines in announcing the strategy, which aims to turn the group into a world-class business entity, was “Change everything but your wife and children.”
Samsung insiders said Lee, who returned home in December after spending two months abroad, plans to head overseas again but is not likely to visit the Consumer Electronics Show, which runs through Friday (local time) in Las Vegas. Lee has visited the CES in 2010 and 2012.
Samsung Electronics Co., the key affiliate of Samsung Group, is estimated to have posted a record-high operating profit of 36.77 trillion won (US$34.46 billion) in 2013, the company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday, although its fourth-quarter operating profit in that year is assessed to have plunged 18.3 percent from the previous three-month period. The estimate fell short of initial expectations, casting cloud over its future performance.
Earlier this year, Lee said in his New Year’s message that Samsung needs to look further out than others and come up with new technologies and enter new markets that call for the convergence of industries and technologies. (Yonhap)

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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