Samsung began as a small trading business
When Lee Byung-chul founded Samsung in Daegu in 1938, it was not making televisions or phones. The company—then called Samsung Sanghoe—bought and sold everyday goods, including dried fish, produce and noodles. It also traded some products abroad, including to parts of China.
That business model depended on moving goods rather than inventing devices: buy from producers, find customers, and handle the exchange. In a period when most people knew Samsung as a local merchant, electronics lay far in the future.
From trading to a diversified group
Over the following decades, Samsung expanded into other lines of business, including food processing, textiles, insurance and retail. This shift from trading into manufacturing and services helped turn the company into a much larger industrial group, a type of South Korean conglomerate often called a chaebol.
Samsung Electronics was established in 1969, more than three decades after the original trading company opened. Its rise in consumer electronics grew out of that broader expansion—not from a company that had been building gadgets from the start. The striking change is how far Samsung moved from its first transactions: from selling basic goods to making products used in homes around the world.
