Samsung was founded by Byung-Chull Lee in 1938 in Taegu, Korea.

The
company started as a food exporter in Korea and shipped items like dried fish
and flour to China.
Samsung got into other businesses throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including
life insurance and textiles.
Samsung Electronics started in 1969. That division mostly made TVs.
Samsung's first black and white TV went on sale in 1970.
Samsung expanded into even more fields in the 1970s, including
petrochemicals. It also started making washing machines, refrigerators, and
microwaves.
Samsung began to focus even more on electronics in the 1980s. The company
began producing color TVs, personal computers, VCRs, and tape recorders.
This was also the decade Samsung started exporting more of its products to
North America.
Samsung teamed up with BP in 1989 to form Samsung BP Chemicals. The
company sells chemical products in Korea.
In the early and mid-1990s, Samsung started producing memory and hard
drives for use in personal computers. That's still a big part of Samsung's
business today.
According to company legend, one of Samsung's first mobile phones did not
work when it came out in 1995. When Samsung's chairman Kun-Hee Lee found
out, he visited the factory where the phones were made and reportedly had the
entire inventory burned.
After that initial slip up, Samsung began taking mobile more seriously by the
late 1990s. It released one of its first Internet-ready phones in 1999. Mobile
would eventually grow into Samsung's most profitable business.
In the late 1990s, Samsung made more advances in television. It created the
world's first mass-produced digital TV in 1998. It had a full lineup of digital TVs
by 1999.
Samsung began making HD TVs in the early 2000s. It went on to make Blu-Ray
players and other home theater equipment. Today, Samsung makes some of
the best HD TVs you can buy.
Defunct
In 1998, Samsung created a U.S. joint venture with Compaqcalled Alpha Processor Inc. (API)--
to help it enter the high-end processor market. The venture was also aimed at expanding
Samsung's non-memory chip business by fabricating Alpha processors. At the time, Samsung
and Compaq invested $500 million in Alpha Processor.
GE Samsung Lighting was a joint venture between Samsung and the GE Lighting subsidiary
of General Electric. The venture was established in 1998 and was broken up in 2009.
Global Steel Exchange was a joint venture formed in 2000 between Samsung, the U.S.-
based Cargill, the Switzerland-based Duferco Group, and the Luxembourg-based Tradearbed
(now part of the ArcelorMittal), to handle their online buying and selling of steel.
S-LCD Corporation was a joint venture between Samsung Electronics (50% plus one share) and
the Japan-based Sony Corporation (50% minus one share) which was established in April 2004.
On 26 December 2011, Samsung Electronics announced that it would acquire all of Sony's
shares in the venture.