Tag: family business

Olin’s central course on family business is “Ownership Insights: Strategic Leadership of the Family- and Employee-Owned Firm.” In this course, Spencer Burke, Eugene F. Williams Jr. Executive in Residence, and I (Peter Boumgarden) have spent the last few weeks identifying the choices owners face in their business and their respective impact on firm performance. 

One framework for ownership decisions centers around Josh Baron’s helpful conceptualization of the five choices that owners can make in their business. It is nicely captured in his book, Harvard Business Review Family Business Handbook, which we both recommend. Josh argues that owners have the power to:

• Design the type of ownership you want (Design)
• Plan for the transition to the next generation (Transfer)
• Use effective communication to build trusted relationships (Communication)
• Structure governance to make great decisions together (Decide)
• Create an ownership strategy to define success (Value)

In this blog post, I want to show how this framework translates into teaching our students to understand the consequences of ownership decisions in the family firm.

Ownership choices and value constellations

One of the things I most appreciate about Josh’s tool is the clarity by which he brings out the potential choices in play for owners of organizations.

Amongst all of these five choices (design, transfer, communicate, decide, value), what I get most excited about with private enterprise is the possibility of intentionally defining value—or success—in different ways than those in other ownership forms. Our course, in particular, seeks to extend this work by formally filling out all the influences on ownership choices, from changing demographics and its impact on the family tree and succession to differences in cultural psychology across regions and how it shapes what is considered fair in different spaces. You can see the full framework below.

One of the critiques of family business as an ownership form is found in research by Nicholas Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. Using the World Management Survey (WMS) as a tool, the researchers argue that family businesses with family CEOs are less well run than many other ownership forms in the market (dispersed shareholders, private equity controlled, etc.). A great deal of the power of this work is that companies that are independently scored high on these 19 dimensions empirically perform better on many measures of company financial performance than companies who score lower.While I like this research a great deal, if you dig into the “World Management Survey” items (here is a survey from retail, for example), it also becomes clear that these are not value-free items. Let’s look at three examples in particular to illustrate the point, with the item identified first, and the description of the top score identified after:

• CONSEQUENCE MANAGEMENT – Top Score: A failure to achieve agreed targets drives retraining in identified areas of weakness or moving individuals to where their skills are appropriate.
• TARGET INTERCONNECTEDNESS – Top Score: Corporate goals focus on shareholder value; they increase in specificity as they cascade through business units ultimately defining individual performance expectations.
• RETAINING TALENT – Top Score: We do whatever it takes to retain our top talent.

Many of us can see why companies like this might perform well and perhaps be the kinds of companies we might want to invest in or work for. But, for the sake of argument, let’s consider another company wedded to a different set of values along these exact dimensions.

• CONSEQUENCE MANAGEMENT – “At Company X, we set clear goals for our people but build in a care for people when they don’t perform at expectation, knowing that circumstances sometimes sit outside one’s control.” 
• TARGET INTERCONNECTEDNESS – “As owners of Company X, we desire strong shareholder performance, as that is in our financial interest. That said, we want to ensure that multiple stakeholders of the business, from you as employees to the communities we sit within, matter a great deal. As such, if we add value for those other groups and this sometimes occurs at the expense of shareholder value, we will still consider that a good year.”
• RETAINING TALENT -”We want you to perform well here. That said, we know that this might not be the fit for your forever. As such, if this company is not the best place for you, we want you to know that we care about you enough to want to find the best fit for you moving forward, even if that place is not here.”

I bring up these points of comparison not to suggest that the latter is a better way of performing, but rather to show how you could see an owner setting up their business like this and thus defining value in a very different way. In many ways, our economy functions in healthy ways when it is represented by companies reflecting a wider plurality of value positions, and not all of the same ownership model (private, public, PE owned, family owned, employee owned, etc.)

The lived philosophy in family and private enterprise

We have seen many of these differences reflected in the comments from class speakers, someof whom have already shown up and others to come in the next few weeks:

• Matt Villa (2nd Gen), Villa Lighting
• Ross Millman (4th Gen), Millman Lumber
• Elizabeth Niedringhaus (2nd Gen), SSE
• John Jennings, St. Louis Trust and Family Office
• Mike Lefton (2nd Gen), Metal Exchange Corp
• Ryan Plotkin (2nd Gen), M-D Building
• Kristi Humes (2nd Gen), Tacony Corp
• Eric Gilbert (2nd Gen), Anova Furnishings
• Ted Briscoe (Multi-Gen), Sydenstricker Nobbe Partners
• David Weiss (1st Gen), Podiatry Growth Partners 

This summer, I was on a long run with a good friend, Chris Bolyard. Located in the Maplewood neighborhood of St. Louis, Chris’ butcher shop, Bolyard’s Meat and Provisions, is one of Food and Wine’s Best Butcher Shops in America. On the run, Chris and I got to talk about whether he would ever open multiple shops or grow his enterprise outside of St. Louis. We had a few mutual friends who had done similar things with their restaurants, so you could see what might be appealing. While Chris didn’t outright say he wouldn’t do those things, it became clear that this was not a fundamental priority for his business. He saw the strain this would have on his family, his lifestyle, and perhaps even his ability to keep the same quality standards across the operations.

Chris’ north star is on product quality and serving his neighborhood customers over and above rapid growth and expansion. To take it a step further, even if he did move to multiple locations, it is clear that Chris does not aspire to be Tyson Foods. So, would it be fair to compare Tyson Food to Bolyard’s Meat and Provisions? No, for in many ways, these two are running in fundamentally different races.

Ownership strategy to define and drive value

The trap that a family business center like ours needs to avoid is believing that our mission is to tell our audience a set of sugary truths we think they want to hear. This belief might lead us to make claims that are empirically hard to justify (“Family ownership of any form is the best ownership form in the world, in all times and all places”) . As a research based institution, this is not a path we should or will follow. 

At the same time, the challenge for many business schools in the world is we too often have bought into an overly narrow, quantitative, and academic view of value (“shareholder value”, “ROIC,” “IRR,” “professionalism”) and have a hard time seeing what other constellations of value choices can be just as compelling. At the Koch Center, we hope to explore some of these distinct concepts of value and the strategic implications of organizing around such structured purposes.

There are significant challenges for most family businesses: the incentives of family shareholders, the challenges of maintaining family harmony through different business ups and downs, a family which grows faster than a business, fairness in succession of ownership, control, and management, amongst others—many of which we address in the course and the programming of the Center. With that said, what is compelling about the closely held business, whether family, employee or privately owned, is the opportunity to define a distinct set of values, and then organize a strategy and structures around such ends. Doing this well is hard work. At the Koch Center, we hope to contribute to this important task through a mix of academic clarity and educational expertise for those within and outside the halls of Washington University.

Peter Boumgarden, Koch Center’s director and Olin’s Koch Professor of Practice of Family Enterprise, wrote this for the Olin Blog.

When it comes to our mission of supporting family business leaders as they pursue new ways to thrive in the emerging economy, we can learn a great deal by looking at WashU Olin’s model of being data-driven and values-based. But living this theory in practice means flexing a muscle that is often under-developed in many organizations, family businesses notwithstanding.

So what does it mean to have an eye toward relevant data while simultaneously being shaped by a guiding set of values? At the Koch Center, one way that we do this is in our unique approach to combining data and design in our engagement with the broader business community.

Inaugural data+design dession: Balancing continuity and change

On October 29, the Koch Center hosted the first of our new “data+design” series. Each of these sessions is organized around a particular strategic challenge for organizations. Our first event focused on how family and private enterprise balance a commitment to continuity with the past alongside the need to change to match any number of emerging realities.

Approximately 50 leaders from around the region participated in a session designed to leverage some of the university’s best offerings, particularly a rigorous approach to data built upon a strong research foundation. Unique to this model, we asked each participating leader to fill out an assessment that mapped their organization across several distinct dimensions before our time together. This battery of assessments included a modified version of the “World Management Survey,” a measure of business uncertainty, and an evaluation of how much they have changed over the past year and must change over the year ahead.

While it can be helpful to get objective numbers on these items, the data+design format enabled us to provide each attendee with a customized report that contrasted their self-assessment with all other attendees. Indeed, much of the value can come through this comparison. It is one thing to know you self-assessed at a “3.5” out of “5” when it comes to your company’s talent strategy, but a whole different level of insight if you know others in your organization scored this same item lower, and the average across a set of peer institutions was closer to 4.

With comparative data in hand, the group came together on October 29 and heard me present a set of research-backed framings on what kind of balance is especially high-performing. One study in particular from McKinsey & Company indicated that firms that maintain a relatively robust refresh rate in their product/service portfolio outperform those who do not change enough and those who change too frequently. This refresh rate of approximately 10-30% change over a decade they called “rivers” in contrast to the static “ponds” (less than 10% refresh) or overly dynamic “rapids” (over 30% change). Simultaneously presented with data about where their organization stands alongside a guiding framework to guide our discussion, and we were off to the races.

Extending rigorous measures with design and values

But back to Olin’s guiding framing, even rigorous data without a precise understanding of values runs into limits. After all, it is one thing to know your organization’s metrics compared to your peers, but the leader still has to make clear tradeoffs on what they are optimizing toward and why.

For example, core value commitments will inevitably shape whether one prioritizes progress on this dimension and how one goes about operationalizing this commitment. For example, how do leaders balance accountability with grace? What kind of patience is required as people move to aspirational performance standards? Critical considerations for building this into practice are not always easily captured in the data alone.

And so, the discussion pushed forward with designing potential futures with data in one hand and a set of guiding values in mind. The “design” part of “data+design” came in by our use of forcing mechanisms to have those present consider more than one potential future for these design challenges. “Want to professionalize your approach to growth and innovation? Let’s see if you can identify four different routes in this direction.”

In this approach, we used a modified version of the “Crazy 8’s” design prompt to push people to generate four different alternative futures. In doing so, we encouraged leaders to expand the number of strategic options too many of us consider—which Dan and Chip Heath have found is unfortunately often only one.

Generating progress through the power of data and design

Generating creative routes forward for family businesses will require creativity. In so much as this ownership form is commonplace across the country and globe, approaching questions of strategy and structure with fresh eyes holds the potential for a transformative effect for the families who lead the operations and the broader global economy.

As a university, one of our goals is to support this creativity by bringing elucidating frameworks and the precision of empirical work while at the same point leveraging the teaching function to push our thinking in ways we would not have considered previously. For us, this work requires leveraging the power of data while also operating up to the generative power of design fueled by close attention to both leader and firm values.

We look forward to walking this journey together.

Family-owned M-D Building Products Inc. has named a new president. The Oklahoma-based company develops, manufactures and markets a range of residential and commercial weatherization, flooring, caulking and specialty extrusion products.

Following its centennial anniversary, the company appointed Ryan Plotkin, MBA ’16, who plans to “take M-D to the next level” under his leadership by fostering innovation and efficiency, according to the company’s press release. As president, Plotkin will “lead operational growth plans surrounding the consumer products, specified extrusion manufacturing and professional flooring divisions.”

In the release, the company’s board indicated that it enthusiastically supported Plotkin’s appointment, citing his focus, energy and commitment to driving progress within the company.

Plotkin held the position of chief operating officer after his graduation from Olin’s MBA program. He has been with M-D Building Products since the company hired him as a global business manager in 2008.

Family members who are CEOs of their family business remain in the role longer and are rarely forced out. That’s one finding in a newly released research brief from the Koch Center for Family Business, “Family CEOs, Turnover, and Firm Performance.”

The brief was co-written by Koch Center Director Barton H. Hamilton, Professor Andres Hincapie (UNC), and research fellows Simone Hanna and Noah Lyman.

The brief details the following findings regarding the turnover and performance of CEOs in family businesses:

• CEO performance has a signicant impact on the likelihood of forced turnover.
• Family CEO successors remain CEO for longer and are almost never forced out.
• Insiders (both family and non-family) tend to be appointed in more profitable companies than outsiders. Insider CEOs appear to outperform outsiders as a result.
• Family insiders are younger and have more experience in the firm at time of appointment than unrelated insiders.
• Founders are more likely to be forcibly removed from office by year two than any other CEO type.

Find more research and resources on family business and succession at the Koch Center site.

Olin Blog post by Spencer Burke, Koch Center Eugene F. Williams Jr. Executive in Residence. See more of his reviews and articles on his page at the St. Louis Trust.

Samsung Rising is the remarkable story of how a family-owned vegetable and dried fish shop established in 1938 has grown to become one of the largest and most valuable technology companies in the world.

It is part of Samsung Group, a Korean chaebol (a family group of companies or “wealth clan”) and is best known for Samsung Electronics, which is a global leader in the smartphone market and semiconductor manufacturing. The group is controlled by five separate branches of the founder’s (B.C. Lee) family; the family is one of the wealthiest in the world with an estimated net worth of over $40 billion.

The group is made up today of over 60 independent companies, many of them publicly listed, which, in the aggregate, account for approximately 20% of the GDP of South Korea and employ over 310,000. The family control is achieved through an opaque web of cross-shareholdings and inter-marriages among the Lee family and other owners of the constituent companies.

The current (de facto) head of Samsung is its Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee, the son of Lee Kun-hee (Lee II). Lee II became chairman of Samsung in 1987 when his father, B.C. Lee, died. He retains the title of chairman despite having been incapacitated and non-functioning since May 2014 when he had a heart attack and a stroke.

Samsung Rising is subtitled “The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant that Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech” and reads like a Hollywood movie script. The author, Geoffrey Cain, a journalist with The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, has spent much of his career reporting on Samsung. The book is a compilation, more or less in chronological order, of hundreds of interviews, many of them anonymous, with key Samsung employees, competitors and suppliers.

The ‘exploding phone’

This “unauthorized” biography is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the intrigue, family in-fighting, corruption and government entanglements with and support of this important company. As you will learn from reading this book, Korea’s success as a nation is intimately tied to the success of Samsung and vice versa.

The starting point of the story is the recent spectacular failure of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone (the “exploding phone”). The author then takes the reader back in time to explain how this modest family vegetable shop transitioned its business to become the global leader in inexpensive and second rate consumer products, such as microwave ovens and TV sets, then on to challenge Apple’s domination in the global smartphone market and Sony’s domination in consumer electronics and, from there, to become a leading supplier of advanced semiconductors to the tech industry.

To my surprise, Steve Jobs and Ellen DeGeneres each play a significant role in helping Samsung make these leaps, as do many U.S. based technology and marketing experts and advisors. Legions of patent lawyers also play their part in this story as Apple and Samsung have spent a fortune over the years battling in courts around the world over the ownership of the intellectual property that has made all their technology advances possible.

Samsung Rising is also a book about family business in Korea. The Lee family control of Samsung is in its third generation and faces many of the same challenges faced by many successful multi-generational family businesses.

There are disputes and jealousies among the different branches of the family over ownership and wealth, there are on-going leadership succession issues at the company and there is a massive estate tax liability lurking that may result in the Lee family’s loss of control of some or all of the Group. There is also the issue that the third-generation leader of the company, hand-picked by his father, may not be of the same caliber of his two predecessors.

This all sounds familiar, but there is a lot more to learn from the story because of the vast differences between the cultural and business environments in Korea and the US. Through the lens of the Samsung success story, it is fascinating to see how these differences are playing out in real time. So far, the Lee family and Samsung have benefited tremendously from them.

However, darker clouds are on the horizon. The most prominent differences include:

Business purpose

B.C. was a patriot and had immense pride in his home country. While working in Japan before WWII, he was a skilled observer of the Japanese economy and the companies that made Japan so successful. He dreamed of doing the same for his homeland and that is what he set out to do when he returned home in the late 1930s. B.C. Lee’s perspective on this is best illustrated by this quotation from a plaque in the miniature shrine that marks the company’s first place of business:

“I think people are most happy when they know what gives their life purpose. I am unshakeable in my faith that strengthening the nation through business is the path I must walk” (p. 32)

The motto on the Lee family crest also emphasized this: “First, serving the nation through business. Second, people and talent come first. Third, the pursuit of the reasonable.” (p. 41)

The shared identity of Samsung’s success with that of Korea has taken on an almost militaristic tone. The author notes:

“The odd similarities between the traditional culture of Samsung (and other South Korean companies) and the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea are no coincidence. The Korea scholar B.R. Meyers has written about North and South Koreans’ belief in a shared, ancient bloodline that informs their politics and societies today. South Koreans, he argues have identified strongly with the Korean race that transcends a border with North Korea, a far stronger identification than with their democratic system of government.

“The result, he says, is that North Korea is the world’s most nationalistic country, while ‘the second most nationalistic country, in my view, is South Korea, which is completely open and completely wired, and still dominated by a very paranoid way of looking at the outside world’.” (p. 65)

The book makes many references to the “cult-like” environment and behavior at Samsung. Other successful companies have this as well, but this one is particularly focused on the company’s identity with the success of South Korea as a nation. This clearly has been a major contributor to Samsung’s success.

Chaebol business structure

B.C. was also a big fan of the success of leading Japanese companies, such as Sony, Toyota and Honda. These companies are called keiretsu and, unlike the traditional Japanese zaibatsu structure, are not always run by families but by “shareholding collectives, centered around a private bank, marking a break in Japanese tradition.” (p. 36) The keiretsu form of organizational structure arose in Japan because the U.S. military banned the formation of holding companies after WW II in an effort to reduce the economic power of the zaibatsu families. The author goes on to explain:

“South Korea followed with its own ban on holding companies. But its business leaders were determined to keep the zaibatsu practice of top-down family rule. So they embraced the cross-shareholding practices similar to Japan’s newer keiretsu companies, and found loopholes to pass those cross-shareholdings to their children, through charitable donations and mergers within their business empires.” (p. 36)

The Korean form of the keiretsu is the chaebol and here is what the author had to say about it:

“Pointing to the similarities between Samsung and other companies doesn’t dismiss the common culture and heritage between North and South Korea and, to some extent, Japan and China. The fact is that the South Korean chaebol have little in common with the more entrepreneurial and shareholder-driven firms in the United States.

“Even the biggest companies in the United States do not enjoy the privileges of companies in South Korea today. More than half of the family leaders of the ten biggest chaebol groups are convicted criminals. All have been pardoned by the president, often without serving prison time. Three of them, including Samsung chairman Lee II, have been pardoned twice.

From January 2015 to February 2016, the outside members of Samsung Electronics’ board of directors—who were supposed to be independent, as a check on corporate governance—unanimously approved every proposal put forward by the company, except the two times a director was absent.

“Imagine the heirs of the Carnegies and Rockefellers being so powerful and revered that The New York Times would self-censor its coverage out of deference. Imagine a White House pardoning the heirs of Sam Walton or Ray Kroc, as they ran the operations of Walmart or McDonald’s from their prison cells. Or seasoned journalists turning their eyes away when confronted with Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest between his presidential duties and his businesses.

“Because of the outsized privileges of Samsung and the Lee family, South Koreans tell me that Samsung has grown too big to fail”. (p.71-72)

Collective Harmony family culture

The dominant cultural style in East Asia is referred to as the Collective Harmony culture and the Lee family is a great example of it. Here are a few useful descriptions of its primary characteristics:

“[This culture is] premised on Confucian principles elevating loyalty and obligation to family, respect for parents and other authorities, knowing one’s place, and supporting the whole group rather than one’s individual position…..

“The concept of ‘face’ is central to Collective Harmony culture….The term has no exact counterpart in Western language. It contains elements of prestige, honor, respect, reputation and influence. However, it is much more socially-derived and -connected…

“In Collective Harmony, the web of social relationships is much more influential in maintaining individuals’ esteem. This is important because direct assertive communication may tear all too easily at the bonds between individuals and their social network if not handled carefully, especially in families.” Jaffe and Grubman, Cross Cultures (2016) (p. 37-38)

By contrast, US and other western countries typically are guided by an individualistic family culture. There, the purpose of larger organizations, such as family and businesses, is to support the independence and self-worth of each individual.

Cain emphasizes the important role of this family culture at various points in the story. He quotes a noted historian on Korea who said, “It’s a very basic Korean trait that trust rarely extends beyond one’s family, and that includes the Samsung family”. He goes on to say that Samsung’s and Korea’s common heritage evidences itself in five traditions:

“The extreme reverence for family dynasties; the belief that their strength is derived from an ethnic bloodline; the promulgation of military-like rituals, ceremonies, and slogans; nationalistic paranoia and distrust of outsiders; and the veneration of a supposedly wise, paternalistic emperor-like leader.” (p. 67)

This culture has served Samsung well through its first two generation of leadership. As it moves fully into the third generation and must compete with the largest and best run tech companies in the world, one must wonder if it will continue to do so. Command and control management and dynastic succession are not likely recipes for success in this competitive world.

Estate taxation/regulatory environment

It was fascinating to learn from this book about the rejection of the zaibutsu and holding company corporate structure in South Korea as a means to grow the economy after the devastation of the Korean War. Another key feature of the post war regulatory regime in Korea was the imposition of a 50% inheritance tax on the inter-generational transfer of wealth; in the case of an inheritance of a “controlling stake” in a company, the tax rate rises to 65%. As in the U.S., there is a correlative gift tax regime with the same tax rates for life-time asset transfers.

The chaebol corporate structure and this inheritance tax regime turn out to be a very toxic combination. Most of the ownership stakes in the chaebol are minority positions—it is the aggregation of these ownership stakes which give families the ability to “control” the entities but not necessarily the ability to monetize those stakes or use company assets to pay their taxes.

Family leaders need to transfer assets downstream very early in their careers when asset values are low to minimize the inheritance tax, but this endangers their ability to “indirectly” control the corporate entities in the group. If they wait too long and asset values have risen dramatically, as is the case with most of the chaebols, the tax obligations at death likely will force the sale of a substantial part of the ownership in the group and may lead to a loss of control. This is exactly the predicament that the Lee’s find themselves in today and it has caused no end of controversy.

The taxable estate of Lee II is estimated to be about $17 billion, meaning that a tax bill of roughly $8.5 billion in taxes will be due at his death, which could be at any time now. This is a problem shared by many of the large family-controlled companies in Korea. A recent Financial Times article estimates that the aggregate estate taxes owing by the largest 25 Korean companies now exceeds $21 billion. That liability grows daily.

Efforts by families to minimize the impact of this tax have ensnared many chaebol leaders and Jay Lee is prominent among them. In fact, Jay Lee is currently being dogged by prosecutors who have alleged that he engaged in a fraudulent merger transaction among two Samsung affiliates for the purpose of shoring up his ownership stake in Samsung Electronics so the Lee family would have a funding source to pay the inheritance tax. Approval of this merger also led the Lee’s to manipulate the accounting records of yet another company in the Samsung Group to inflate the stated value of the acquiring company in the proposed merger transaction.

Coincident with all this, Jay Lee made a $38 million dollar “contribution” to a close friend of the former Korean President so she could finance her family’s efforts to compete in the equestrian events at the up-coming Summer Olympic Games. Prosecutors have alleged that this payment was in fact a bribe for approval of the merger transaction. If convicted of any of these charges, Samsung’s Chairman in waiting will be waiting in prison for a long, long time.

Jay Lee may have gotten away with all this but for the watchful eye of Paul Elliott Singer, the founder of US-based hedge fund Elliott Management. Singer, described by some as “The World’s Most Feared Investor,” owned a minority stake in the company that the Lee family was attempting to swallow-up in the merger for a price far below its fair market value. 

Singer sued to block the proposed merger but his claim was denied; a civil fraud suit is still pending. Despite obvious breaches of fiduciary duty and fraud, the transaction garnered close to 70% shareholder approval, including approval by the National Pension Fund of Korea that lost millions of dollars for pensioners on the transaction.

Behavior like this gets much greater scrutiny in the US and is a cautionary tale for those investing in the equity of non-US companies subject to different legal systems and cultural norms. The legal standards of fiduciary duty, anti-trust and corporate law are often very different there.

The story of the Lee family’s desperate efforts to address its looming estate tax liability is a highlight of the book. This story had gotten very little public attention outside of Korea considering the size and importance of the Samsung Group and the prominence of the Lee family. It also lays bare the difficult challenges faced by chaebol owners to remain in control of their companies in the future. Add to this a growing clamor in Korean politics over income inequality and the need to rein in the power (and wealth) of the chaebols. Clearly, the family owners have many challenges ahead.

Samsung Rising is well worth a read for those interested in the global technology market and Korea’s (aka Samsung’s) remarkable rise to prominence in recent years. It is especially interesting right at this time, since Samsung Electronics has become a key ally of the U.S. in its attempt to slow down the domination of Huawei in the 5G market.

For those interested in family business, this is a must read. It is an exciting growth story and highlights the prominent role of purpose, family culture and government regulation and support to Samsung’s success.