A South Korean chaebol family keeps control by owning a company that owns shares in its other companies, rather than by owning everything itself. Samsung is the clearest case. CNBC described Samsung C&T in 2023 as an industrial conglomerate the Lee family controls through several affiliates that own stakes in each other.
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How one company holds the rest
Samsung C&T had a stock market value of about $15 billion when CNBC looked at it. Its main assets were an operating business and stakes in five listed Samsung companies. CNBC put the after-tax value of those stakes at $30.9 billion. The biggest were Samsung Electronics at $13.9 billion and Samsung Biologics at $13.4 billion. Smaller holdings in Samsung SDS, Samsung Life and Samsung Engineering made up the rest.
That is how a family can steer a large group without owning it outright. Whoever controls one affiliate extends its influence to the companies that affiliate owns shares in. According to CNBC, the company was put together through a run of mergers designed more to keep the family in control than to run efficiently.
A family firm that became a group
Samsung started as a small trading firm that Lee Byung-Chull founded in 1938, under the Japanese occupation. Quartz noted in 2014 that his heirs still controlled it. By then the group took in insurance, credit cards, amusement parks, lithium batteries and construction, among other businesses. Quartz counted Hyundai and LG among the other family-run conglomerates that had led South Korea’s economy for decades.
The same pattern shows up across the country’s largest groups. A blog summarising figures from Korea’s Fair Trade Commission reports that 81 groups with a named controller had an average direct family stake of 3.7% in 2025. Counting stakes held by affiliates and other insiders, their average “internal ownership” reached 62.4%.
Why most groups changed and Samsung did not
The web has a price. CNBC reported that South Korean chaebols had spent the previous 20 years converting to two-layer holding company structures. The reason was that cross-owned groups trade at a discount to the value of what they own. By CNBC’s account, Samsung was one of only two large South Korean companies still organised the old way.
That discount is what drew the activist fund Palliser Capital. It announced a 0.62% stake in Samsung C&T on December 6, 2023. Palliser argued that the company traded at a 63% discount to its assets. It proposed steps it said could create $25 billion of shareholder value, including a move to a holding company structure.
Korean law now pushes in the same direction. Within the largest groups, the Fair Trade Commission restricts cross-shareholdings and new circular shareholdings, according to the same blog summary.
