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Comment by stogot | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing this SK company’s brands everywhere. It’s a huge conglomerate, privately owned, that seems to be expanding rapidly and doing very well. Does anyone know why they’re so successful or is my misperception?

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Imho, if they're well managed, any private enterprise that is capitalized and has a long term outlook can run circles around public company management that can barely keep a year of marketing strategy consistent, let alone deep technical development.

Though, AFAICT, US public companies are the worst regarding financial short-term thinking. It's not as bad in other countries.

It is also possible to make the same mistakes for different reasons: lack of imagination, conservatism, entrenched interests...

Korean conglomerates are focused on hard sciences and there is very little room to do anything else that's why they excel here. They hire from the best Ivy style schools in Korea and focus on cutting edge stuff or improving cutting edge manufacturing

Here's the catch. Because of these constraints Korean conglomerates dont create as many jobs.Korean software or services industry is almost non existent or heavily constrained to Korea.

There is also to say that Chaebols (i.e. Korean conglomerates) can do basically whatever they want because the Korean government will bail them out/give them the financial support they need.

With this, the "I need to be extremely profitable" burden is somewhat lifted, giving them the freedom to do hard R&D.

And it is true now still, with the last bribery in exchange of favors dating back to 2018 [1]

[1] https://bruinpoliticalreview.org/articles?post-slug=south-ko...

> Here's the catch. Because of these constraints Korean conglomerates don't create as many jobs.Korean software or services industry is almost non existent or heavily constrained to Korea.

What? Korea's software jobs per capita is one of the highest of all wealthy (let's say top 30 HDI) countries. Please stop claiming this sort of stuff without being familiar with the country.

They've been around in one form or another since the early 80s, and have been in and out of a few of the major chaebols in that time. I wouldn't call them privately owned in the western sense, necessarily. There's no institutional investment behind the chaebols themselves generally, they're 'owned' by a single family and passed down hereditarily, and are nationalistic in a certain sense; they're much more closely ingrained with both government and state identity than most western corps.

They're not privately owned. Bunch of SK companies are publicly traded in Korean stock market, including fore mentioned SK Hynix KRX: 000660

They purchased Intel's entire NAND business a few years back, so they just kind of exploded into the SSD market. They sometimes sell their drives under the name Solidigm.

I think SK Hynix's NAND business may have already been bigger than Intel's NAND business when they made that acquisition. Certainly by then SK Hynix had recovered from being late to the 3D NAND transition, while Intel was on a worse technological trajectory with their roadmap that diverged from the rest of the industry.

Your impression that they were at all new to the SSD market is largely due to the fact that SK Hynix operated mainly as a component supplier, and has never pursued promotion of their own retail SSD brand the way Samsung does. Hynix was a major player in the NAND industry before the SSD market as we know it even existed, and has been a major supplier of SSDs to PC OEMs for as long as PC OEMs have been buying SSDs in large volumes.

As others have noted, SK is not private - although it's hard to say whether it's private or public as it's more of group of companies. But many of larger companies including Holding Co is private. The company in this article's context is SK Hynix which is second largest (or third?) on Korean exchange. Just like other conglomerates in this country, SK Group runs many other businesses including bio, finance, telecom, etc.

Aren’t all South Korean conglomerates like that? Samsung, SK, LG, Lotte, … they have shocking broad business lines even if you just know them for something more narrow.

Yes. You can technically drive Samsung branded cars, and live in LG built condo buildings.

Samsung makes container ships, they built the Burj Khalifa, they operate a theme park.

SK Group is one of the big Korean chaebols. An important thing to understand when looking at South Korean politics and economics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK_Group

Note that "SK" does not stand for "South Korea", as one might be lead to believe.

Hasn't this been a common trope for past ~50 years? East Asian anything is at least within a few miles to American/European anything, but way cheaper thanks to USD dominance, and that situation renders non-Asian industrial fabrication pointless and unsustainable, and East Asian products win.

From Toyota cars to Sony TVs to TSMC chips to DJI drones. It's been that way for a while.

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