The Life of Kim Woo-Choong: Great Success, Epic Failure
On this day December 19 in the year , Kim Woo-Choong was born in Daegu, South Korea. He was a former employee of a small textile trading company before he founded the Daewoo Group &#; one of the biggest business conglomerates in South Korea in the s. As a child, he delivered newspaper to earn money to help his family which for a time was in financial problems.
Then his father was appointed as a mentor to the military officer-turned-president Park Chung-Hee. With a better family standing, Kim was enrolled at the prestigious Kyunggi High School and later at Yonsei University in Seoul where he finished a course in economics.
With great enthusiasm for entrepreneurship and using his father&#;s connection to the Park Chung-Hee government, Kim borrowed US$10, to put up his own trading firm which he called Daewoo, meaning &#;great spreading out&#; in Korean. In tandem with the so-called Korean economic miracle in the s to s, the Daewoo group achieved a remarkable growth that enabled it to become top-4 or top-5 Chaebol &#; the term for big business groups in the country.
The growth of the Daewoo group was financed primarily
Despite his diminutive height, Kim Woo-choong was a giant of Asian business but ultimately, his huge achievements were overshadowed by his equally huge hubris.
No corporate figure was as intimately linked to South Korea’s stunning rise and near-downfall amid the Asian financial crisis as Kim, who died Monday evening, aged 82, in a hospital in Suwon, south of Seoul. He had reportedly been in ailing health for months.
Kim created the Daewoo, or Great Universe, Group in amid the epic, early days of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” building it into a globe-bestriding “chips-to-ships” conglomerate by the s.
He was the most risk-tolerant of the founders of chaebol – the family-led colossi around which South Korea’s economy rose.
But his ambition over-reached. Kim resisted reform as the crisis bit deep. In a harsh lesson to other business leaders, Daewoo went under in what was – until the downfall of Enron in – the world’s biggest bankruptcy, at a time when South Korea was uneasily digesting what was then the IMF’s biggest bailout.
Kim’s huge group, which once employed more than , people worldwide, splintered. Though several parts remain in oper
Wanted Kim Woo Choong disappeared from South Korea three years ago as his company was collapsing under a $65 billion pile of debt. Now, in an exclusive interview, the former Daewoo chairman talks about his rise and fall--and his life in exile.
(FORTUNE Magazine) – Kim Woo Choong, long Korea's most respected tycoon and lately its most famous fugitive, appears smaller than life. Once a commanding figure in a smart business suit, the founder and former chairman of Daewoo is slumped on a couch at a remote country house, a frail old man in loose cotton trousers and bare feet. Shrunken by illness--he has lost four inches from his waistline since disappearing from public view more than three years ago--Kim, 66, chain-smokes Marlboro Lights, flashes a weary smile, and speaks in a hesitant voice. But when he begins talking about his shattered global conglomerate, he is transformed into a chief executive in exile.
Since vanishing in , as his companies were collapsing under $65 billion in debt--one of the largest bankruptcies ever--Kim has kept resolutely silent. A wanted man, Kim has been vilified by former employees and branded a criminal by a judge in Seoul. Through it all, he
Kim faced the music as a frail shadow of his former self
(Image credit: Getty Images)
The death of former Daewoo chairman Kim Woo-choong, whose catchphrase, “To the world, to the future!”, inspired legions of young South Korean entrepreneurs, has reignited the debate in the country about his legacy. “Chairman Kim”, who died of pneumonia aged 82 in December, strove to be an “automotive Genghis Khan”, says The New York Times. His “mad-rush corporate expansion” in the s came to symbolise South Korea’s rise as an Asian tiger. Yet it all ended in the biggest bankruptcy in the country’s history when his Daewoo “chaebol” collapsed in
An empire riddled with debt
At the height of his success, “Kim personified South Korea’s unlikely transformation, out of the ashes of brutal civil war, into a manufacturing powerhouse”, says the FT. “But his empire, riddled with fraud and debt, toppled over after the Asian financial crisis, turning Kim and his reliance on personal ties with politicians and state-backed loans into a symbol of what was wrong with the country.” Although it became know
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