Shin Kyuk-ho
| Shin Kyuk-ho | |
|---|---|
| Native name | 신격호 |
| Born |
3 November 1921 Urusan, Japanese Korea (now Ulsan Metropolitan City, South Korea) |
| Nationality |
 Korea (Korean-Japanese) [1] |
| Ethnicity | Korean |
| Education | Waseda University |
| Spouse(s) | Seo Mi-Kyung |
| Children | 4 |
| Shin Kyuk-ho/Takeo Shigemitsu | |||||||
| Japanese name | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kanji | 重光 武雄 | ||||||
| |||||||
| Korean name | |||||||
| Hangul | 신격호 | ||||||
| Hanja | 辛格浩 | ||||||
| |||||||
Shin Kyuk-Ho (Japanese: Takeo Shigemitsu, born 3 November 1921) is a Korean businessman. He founded and led the Lotte group.
Career
Shin is the founder of the Lotte group. He was born in Ulsan, Korea in 1922 and founded Lotte in 1948, which grew from selling chewing gum to children in post-war Japan to becoming a major multinational corporation with overseas branches in dozens of countries and products shipped worldwide. It is now South Korea's eighth largest conglomerate.
Shin was impressed with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and named his company Lotte after the character Charlotte in the novel.
In 2005, Shin was ranked 387th on Forbes magazine's World's Richest People list, and moved up to 136th place in 2006.[2] He currently resides in South Korea for odd months and in Japan for even months. However, reporters have noticed that Shin has been staying in South Korea since the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake in Japan.[3]
Shin started his company two years after graduating from Waseda Jitsugyo High School (Japanese: 早稲田実業学校) in Tokyo.
Personal life
Shin has been married three times. Shin has a total of four children from the three marriages and he is currently married to the former celebrity Seo Mi-kyung. His children, Shin Dong-bin (Akio Shigemitsu), Shin Young-ja, Shin Dong-joo (Hiroyuki Shigemitsu), and Shin Yoo-mi are all involved in Lotte Group. His younger brother Shin Chun-ho is the chairman of Nongshim.