SEOUL -- Eight decades ago, there was little indication that a fruit wholesaler in Daegu, an industrial city in southeastern South Korea, would one day become a sprawling business empire with operations spanning electronics, shipbuilding, insurance, medicine and more.
Lee Byung-chull set up Samsung Commercial Co. -- the forerunner of today's Samsung C&T -- in 1938, when he was 28. The company started out exporting fruit and dried fish to Manchuria and China.
