Samsung is celebrating a birthday. Did you know that he originally sold food?

A South Korean company and the largest smartphone manufacturer, Samsung, celebrates today its 83rd birthday. The Italian portal timemagazine.it recalled that the company did not sell electronics at all in the first half of the last century. It was originally engaged in the distribution and sale of food.

Samsung has built its success on food sales

Samsung was founded on March 1, 1938 in Taegu, present-day South Korea, thanks to the idea of ​​Lee Byung-chula (1910–1987). This member of a wealthy farming family originally from Uiryeong District moved to Taegu at the age of 28, where he founded a company with about forty employees. Samsung Sanghoe had absolutely nothing to do with electronics and was involved in the distribution of food, especially pasta and fish. The company grew and expanded, so Lee Byung-chul’s headquarters moved to Seoul, but only for a short time.

During the Korean War, Lee Byung-chul was forced to move to Busan, where he began looking for new business ideas. Lee then entered the confectionery business. In Busan, Lee founded Cheil Jedang, a sugar company. However, this did not satisfy him and he also wanted to compete with companies in other industries. In 1954, he founded the company Cheil Mojik, whose activity was in the field of wool processing. In a short time, it became the largest woolen plant in the nation. The biggest breakthrough occurred in 1947 after the Second World War.

The largest TV manufacturer in South Korea

Exactly in 1947, Lee formed a joint venture with partner Cho Hong-jai called Samsung Trading Corporation. The fast-growing company was soon renamed Samsung C & T Corporation. Although the business was doing very well, the relationship between the two partners (Cho and Lee) was disrupted. Due to differing views on traffic management, both partners decided to go their own way. Cho was to claim a 30% share upon leaving. Lee continued to expand the Samsung Group’s activities and in the late 1960s created several divisions of the company that began manufacturing electronics.

Samsung SGH-100

Samsung was so successful that in 1978, South Korea was the first company to achieve 4 million TVs in production. Samsung, already known around the world, began investing heavily in research and development in the 1980s. These investments have paid off in a few years and still push the company to a leading position in the global electronics industry. Already in 1995, it released its first GSM mobile phone Samsung SGH-100. However, the Samsung Mobile division only started to grow massively with the arrival of the Android system from Google.

Success in the mobile market was brought to Samsung by the Android system

Samsung’s first Android smartphone was Samsung Galaxy i7500 with a pure Android from 2009. But the huge success came only a year later, when it came on the market Samsung Galaxy i9000, which was known as Galaxy S. This designation is used by Samsung’s flagships to this day and the latest version is Galaxy S21. At the time, the Galaxy S outperformed the AMOLED with its display, performance and camera. Its TouchWiz extension brought several advanced features that pure Android only got in future versions.

The flagships of the series were also a significant success Galaxy Note, which offered the best technology that Samsung had available. And thanks to the S-pen, these models are unique even today, which shows Samsung Galaxy Note 21 Ultra.

The best-selling, however, were the lower-middle and middle-class Galaxy smartphones, whose South Korean giant has produced dozens of models over the past 10 years. Thanks to them, it is still the best-selling smartphone manufacturer in the world. This is despite huge competition in the form of Chinese companies Huawei and Xiaomi.