AmorePacific chairman's noblesse oblige

In the history of companies in Korea and overseas, enterprises that the founders successfully grew by overcoming many challenges have often collapsed due to incompetence or bad behaviors of their successors, who are second-generation or third-generation decedents of the founders. Some say that maintaining businesses is more difficult than founding new firms. AmorePacific Group Chairman Suh Kyung-bae (53) is said to have nurtured the company founded by his late father Suh Sung-hwan into a global enterprise, going beyond sustaining it.

Despite global recession, AmorePacific Group posted 913.6 billion won (817.91 million U.S. dollars) in operating profit on 5.66 trillion won (5.07 billion dollars) in sales last year, a record-high performance in its corporate history. In the first quarter of this year, AmorePacific already topped its previous records in sales and profit after the sales of Sulwhasoo, its flagship cosmetics products, exceeded 1 trillion won (895.3 million dollars) last year. Thanks to surging the company’s share prices, the valuation of Suh’s assets also skyrocketed in tandem. According to the Forbes 2016 World's Billionaires in March, Suh ranked second (148th in the world) with a total asset of 7.7 billion dollars among the Korean entrepreneurs, after Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee.

Chairman Suh founded "Suh Kyung-bae Science Foundation" by investing 300 billion won (268 million dollars) from his private wealth. It is the first foundation dedicated to basic science that an entrepreneur has founded with private funds in Korea. “I want to give dreams and hopes to scientists who cannot afford to continue their research due to lack of funds,” Suh said. “If the foundation fails, it will spoil my own name, and hence I named the foundation after my name to take responsibility,” in emphasizing his unlimited accountability for the foundation. His commitment to use hard-earned money in an exemplary way will be remembered as a case wherein an entrepreneur puts into practice noblesse oblige.

The company’s founder, Suh Sung-hwan, established a laboratory for the first time in the Korean cosmetics industry, which clearly demonstrated his keen interest in technology. Suh Kyung-bae himself also reportedly envisioned and admired the power of science, watching the animation movie "Atom, the Space Boy" as a young boy. Lying behind AmorePacific’s astonishing growth is passion and affection for science and technology displayed by the father and son as entrepreneurs. We hope that Suh will realize his dream that he wants to see the first Korean winner of the Nobel Prize in science before he gets too old in the near future.