Quiz #7
In March 1995, at this company’s plant, employees piled up roughly 150,000 of its own mobile phones, took hammers to them, and set the heap alight beneath a banner demanding perfect quality. The phones were defective, and the man who had inherited the company from his father eight years earlier had decided the cheapest way to teach a workforce to despise defects was to make them watch their own work burn. Two years before, he had gathered his executives in a Frankfurt hotel and told them to change everything except their wives and children. That same appetite for reinvention later showed up in silicon: this was the first foundry anywhere to abandon the FinFET for a gate-all-around nanosheet transistor in volume production, a full node ahead of its larger Taiwanese rival, which kept the older geometry alive at the same nominal dimension. Its chip arm spent years etching the processor at the heart of the very phone its consumer arm was straining hardest to dethrone, and a sister company under the same conglomerate once led the joint venture that raised the tallest building on Earth.
When its foundry executives marked that nanosheet breakthrough, they lined up for the cameras holding three fingers aloft, one for each nanometer. Their founder might have approved of the count: the single word he picked for the company in 1938 sets three points of light in the night sky.
This tech powerhouse also has stakes in consumer electronics, insurance, food processing, and even led the joint venture that built the world's tallest skyscraper in Dubai.
Name the company.
CLUES
Founder Lee Byung-chul chose the name in 1938.
Its foundry built Apple’s A-series chips during the Galaxy-versus-iPhone wars
It is the largest maker of both DRAM and NAND flash.
It’s one of the family-run conglomerates, the chaebol, that dominate a single East Asian economy. Narrow it to the Korean ones and the field is already down to a handful.
SPOILER ALERT: ANSWER BELOW
Answer: Samsung 삼성, literally “three stars”; “sam” means three, “seong” means star