“All of us at Samsung will cherish his memory and are grateful for the journey we shared with him,” the company said.
Lee’s son, Lee Jae-yong, has been the company’s de facto leader since his father’s heart attack. Asked whether the vice chairman would take his father’s title as chairman, Samsung declined to comment.
Lee’s father, Lee Byung-chul, created Samsung in the 1930s as a small trading company and steadily expanded into retail, electronics and other fields.
When the elder Lee passed in 1987, Lee Kun-hee inherited the company and spent the next decade building it into a global corporation. He famously called on his employees in 1993 to “change everything but your wife and children” in the pursuit of leading the company into a new era. Two years later, he ordered a mass burning of Samsung products he considered detective, driving home his vision of a company that put quality ahead of quantity.
The conglomerate is now the largest in South Korea, holding 424.8 trillion won ($376 billion) in assets, according to the country’s Fair Trade Commission. It’s larger than any of South Korea’s other “chaebol,” or the giant family-run conglomerates that dominate the the country’s economy. Hyundai holds about half as many assets.
Lee “led the economic growth of South Korea by turning the semiconductor business into the country’s main industry,” wrote South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a letter to the Lee family that was made public Sunday.
Lee was convicted twice: Once in 1996 on accusations that he bribed politicians, and again in 2008 on charges of tax evasion. In both cases, he avoided prison and received presidential pardons.
In recent years, Lee’s health suffered. He beat lung cancer, but was hospitalized for pneumonia and respiratory issues. In 2014, he slipped into a coma after suffering a heart attack, and never recovered.
It’s not clear who will eventually inherit Lee’s shares in the conglomerate. Lee owns more than 4% of Samsung Electronics, more than 20% of Samsung Life Insurance and nearly 3% of Samsung C&T, a construction and investment entity. His shares are worth billions of dollars.
The share prices of some of the publicly traded divisions of the company spiked Monday in Seoul on speculation about what Lee’s death would mean for the structure of the conglomerate. The family may be forced to sell some of Lee’s shares to pay off a massive inheritance tax, according to Eun Kyung-wan, an analyst at the securities firm Meritz.
Eun added, though, that a “full restructuring” of the conglomerate is unlikely to happen right now.
“It will only be possible once the unpredictability of Lee Jae-yong’s prosecution is dispelled,” Eun said.