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THE founders of South Korea’s chaebol (conglomerates) were an ambitious bunch. Look at the names they picked for their enterprises: Daewoo (“Great Universe”), Hyundai (“The Modern Era”) and Samsung (“Three Stars”, implying a business that would be huge and eternal). Samsung began as a small noodle business in 1938. Since then it has swelled into a network of 83 companies that account for a staggering 13% of South Korea’s exports. The hottest chilli in the Samsung kimchi bowl is Samsung Electronics, which started out making clunky transistor radios but is now the world’s biggest technology firm, measured by sales. It makes more televisions than any other company, and may soon displace Nokia as the biggest maker of mobile-telephone handsets.
Small wonder others are keen to know the secret of Samsung’s success. China sends emissaries to study what makes the firm tick in the same way that it sends its bureaucrats to learn efficient government from Singapore. To some, Samsung is the harbinger of a new Asian model of capitalism. It ignores the Western conventional wisdom. It sprawls into dozens of unrelated industries, from microchips to insurance. It is family-controlled and hierarchical, prizes market share over profits and has an opaque and confusing ownership structure. Yet it is still prodigiously creative, at least in terms of making incremental improvements to other people’s ideas: only IBM earns more patents in America. Having outstripped the Japanese firms it once mimicked, such as Sony, it is rapidly becoming emerging Asia’s version of General Electric, the American conglomerate so beloved of management gurus.

A. 어휘
conglomerates 집단, 集成體(집성체). bunch 다발, 떼거리.
enterprises 기업. eternal 영원한. noodle 국수. swell 팽창하다, 부풀다.
account for 책임을 지다. chilli 고추. clunky 투박한.
keen 갈망하다. emissaries 密使(밀사). tick 똑딱거리다, 작동하다.
bureaucrats 官吏(관리). efficient government 능률적인 통치.
harbinger 선구자. conventional 전통적인. sprawl 팔다리를 뻗다, 기어 다니다.
insurance 보험. hierarchical 계층적인, 계급조직의.
prizes 높이 평가하다, 존중하다. market share 시장 점유율.
opaque 불투명한. prodigiously 엄청나게, 경이로울 정도로.
in terms of ...의 見地(견지)에서. incremental 增分(증분)의, 증가하는.
patents 특허. outstrip 따라가 앞서다. mimicked 모방하다.
guru 도사, 권위자.