Junko Yoshida

10/6/2008 12:01 AM EDT

EE Times editor in chief Junko Yoshida met with Jon Yong Yun, former vice chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, who was in Quebec to receive honorary membership from IEEE, the world's most prestigious engineering society. Meeting with Yun was an eye-opener.

QUEBEC CITY, Canada — Last month, I met Jong Yong Yun, the former vice chairman and CEO of Samsung Electronics, who was here to receive honorary membership from IEEE, the world's most prestigious engineering society.

It was a big deal for him, and for Samsung.

My interview with Yun, a man who pushed Samsung and its brand to new heights, was a huge deal for me—and for EE Times, for that matter. We didn't know what to expect.

While talking to analysts and a about dozen people from chip or technology suppliers that have worked with Samsung, I realized that everyone knew Yun as a legend but nobody had met him in person.

Clearly, Samsung is a huge company and it doesn't often trot out its CEO in public—especially outside South Korea.

However, the more I researched Samsung before the interview, the more I felt convinced I would be meeting an aggressive, chest-thumping, alpha-male corporate executive.

After all, here was a guy who almost singlehandedly turned a no-brand company into the leader in virtually every major market in which it competes—from LCDs to mobile handsets and memory devices.

Moreover, Yun could preach the importance of "quality." He could boast of how he took public brand recognition of Samsung beyond that of Sony.

He could talk about management skills that kept all his senior executives intensely motivated to create and refine synergy among Samsung's various divisions—without adding layers of bureaucracy.

I also formed my preconceptions based on anecdotes about Samsung executives (below Yun) who love to bloviate about their macho, take-no-prisoners business practices.

Eye-opener

But meeting with Yun was an eye-opener. Whatever I had expected, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Yun was calm and gracious, with the manner of a statesman. When I talked of Samsung's success, he responded with a shy smile. But most surprising, he conversed with me in Japanese. I assume he did so to put me at ease, but this also gave me insight into his experiences living in Japan, working with Japanese companies, learning from and eventually surpassing Japan Inc.

Straight out, I asked Yun one thing that always baffled me: How did Japanese manufacturers—designers of the most advanced mobile handsets—allow Samsung to conquer the world handset market?

Yun explained that Samsung couldn't become a player in the analog mobile phone market because patents—owned by Motorola—were "so high."

But when the Korean government adopted Qualcomm-developed CDMA (when no other nation had committed to CDMA), Samsung seized the opening. In a sense, "Samsung saved Qualcomm," according to Yun, by pushing its CDMA phones well beyond the Korean market. Meanwhile, Samsung also made GSM handsets.

In contrast, the Japanese were happy with their own domestic market, since Japan, at one point, owned 30 percent of the worldwide mobile market.

Yun also reminded me that Korea's population is only one-third that of Japan, and Korean GDP is half of Japan's. This made Samsung's drive to pursue the world market a matter of survival.

Yun demystified Samsung's success—not by spouting the magic bullets one tends to hear from management gurus, but by citing the opportunities that had come Samsung's way, and the company's timely and persistent strategic responses.

My last question was whether Yun had any advice for the Japanese electronics manufacturers Samsung had out-hustled. Yun said, "I know [Sony president] Chubachi-san and [Toshiba president] Nishida-san very well. I am in no position to do such a thing." And again, he shared a shy smile.