SK Group will hold a private ceremony at Seonhyewon in Samcheong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, to mark the 73rd anniversary of its founding. Seonhyewon is the former residence of founding Chairman Chey Jong-gun, and SK Group has used it as a talent development space since 1990.
According to the business community on the 8th, the ceremony to be held that day will be attended by Chairman Chey Tae-won of SK Group, Chairman (Vice Chairman) Choi Chang-won of the SK SUPEX Council, and other key executives. At the event, they are expected to reflect on the management philosophy of the late founding Chairman Chey Jong-gun and the late former Chairman Chey Jong-hyun.
Founding Chairman Chey Jong-gun stressed in his lifetime that "the company's development is the nation's development," emphasizing a philosophy that the growth of corporations should extend to society as a whole. He is also known to have emphasized, "There is no obstacle we cannot break through with our wisdom and courage."
His younger brother, former Chairman Chey Jong-hyun, who succeeded the founding chairman, combined Western management theory with Eastern people-centered thought to establish SK Group's unique management control system, the SKMS (SK Management System). He embedded people-centered management in the SKMS to the extent that he left the saying, "First, people; second, people; third, people." Accordingly, he also founded Sunkyung Training Institute, Korea's first corporate training center.
He also set a goal of vertical integration from petroleum to textiles, and in 1980 acquired the Korea Petroleum Corporation, laying the foundation for SK Energy. Later, by acquiring Korea Mobile Telecommunications in the 1990s, SK Group laid the groundwork for entering the information and communications (IT) sector.
Third-generation Chairman Chey Tae-won paved the way for a leap forward by acquiring SK hynix in 2012. SK hynix, which in 2022 became the first in the world to mass-produce fourth-generation high bandwidth memory (HBM3), has established itself as a core growth engine of SK Group.