Chung Ju Yung
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Born in Tongchon, now a town in North Korea, Chung began life as the son of a farmer and received only a primary school education. In 1933 he hiked 120 miles to Seoul, seeking to build his empire. After toiling as a laborer and rice-vending clerk, Chung started an auto-repair shop with little more than a set of old tools. By 1967 his Hyundai ("Modern") company was churning out Fords and had already sprouted an offshoot, Hundai Construction, which became the nucleus of an empire that today manufactures cement, semiconductors, automobiles and a wide variety of other products. Despite his eminence as South Korea's richest businessman (net worth: $6.2 billion), Chung still insists on living in a simple, seven-room home_made of leftover construction materials. Until ill health sidelined him a few years ago, he walked three miles to his Seoul office every day. |
Chung's Hyundai Group set the standard for the companies that made Korea an economic powerhouse. By the time Chung stepped down from the chairmanship in 1987, the sometime poet and avid karaoke singer had built the country's largest shipyard and its first and biggest automaker, a $75 billion company that exported 472,696 cars and trucks in 1995. "With my own initiative, hard work and capability, I made this company grow," he told TIME in 1992. Chung also set a standard in Korea as a strikebreaker, sanctioning strong-arm tactics against labor leaders in the late 1980s. His staunch opposition to independent unions resulted in bloody clashes between workers and police between 1987 and 1992. Like a few other self-made billionaires, Chung couldn't resist investing himself in politics, and in 1992 made a surprise run at South Korea's presidency. Campaigning as a champion of small business and an advocate of gradual reunification with the North, Chung and his United People's Party won a surprising 16% of the vote. The combative industrialist was subsequently accused and convicted by the government of President Kim Young Sam of diverting funds from Hyundai to fuel his political race. Pardoned last August, Chung was well into what will doubtless be his life's last task: overseeing the breakup of Hyundai into 45 separate companies, controlled mostly by sons and nephews. His new hope is that more independent mini-Hyundais will be as competitive in the 21st century as his own megalith is today. |
hung Ju Yung has always
aspired to the Confucian values that Koreans hold
dear. The founder of the Hyundai group, Chung, 80,
made a reputation for himself as an earthy man of
hard work and high-minded principles, a humble sage
and imperious master. His feisty determination
impressed former President Park Chung Hee so much
that in the 1960s the South Korean dictator
tailored his policies to suit Chung's grand
corporate vision and thus forged the world's most
competitive shipbuilding and construction
industries.
