Since its establishment in 1953, CJ CheilJedang has made its priority to provide consumers with quality products.
CheilJedang’s Success Brings the Start of Korean Manufacturing
Lee Byung-chull founded CheilJedang during one of the most turbulent periods in Korea’s modern history, with the Korean War, the April Revolution and the May 16 military coup occurring during this time. Despite this, CheilJedang was set up to succeed from the year it was founded, with the company increasing its capital and sales 125-fold and nearly 56-fold respectively within 10 years of its launch.
“I believe that every small to big business I have undertaken during my lifetime was conceived with the Korean economy in mind, but some of them played an indispensable and pioneering role for the country’s development. The first was the decision to establish CheilJedang in 1953, while artillery was still being fired from the front lines during the Korean War. CheilJedang was the first modern industrial facility created using Korean capital in economic history, and the only production plant with a capitalist manner of production.”
Lee Byung-chull, founder of CheilJedang, “Autobiography of Ho-am”
Going Public: CheilJedang Becomes Korea’s Favorite Food Company
In 1973, 20 years after the company’s founding, CheilJedang went public. In order to go public at that time, a company needed to expand its sales and assets every year as well as publicly present its performance.
At that time, CJ CheilJedang had all the qualifications for an initial public offering. With capital assets totaling KRW 1.9 billion, CheilJedang became one of Korea’s leading food companies, producing goods such as sugar, flour and seasonings, and the most profitable entity in the Samsung Group.
Overcoming Challenges and Rising to the Top
With the initial public offering, CheilJedang set out to make major improvements to its business management and organization. The company began diversifying its product offerings to include sugar, flour, seasonings, feed, cooking oil, soybean and meat processing, steadily expanding into new markets. With its various innovative products, the company became Korea’s leading food companies.
Above all, to keep the customers at the center of its operations, CheilJedang established a consumer service center in 1981. The company installed an automated response system that could receive complaints 24 hours a day, with the company aiming to address complaints within three hours of receipt.
CheilJedang’s sincerity in responding to and handling questions and complaints in a timely fashion resulted in increased sales for the company. As such, in 1986, CheilJedang became the first company in the food industry to reach KRW 500 billion in sales, an impressive accomplishment for the company and a testament to its growing success.
Just five years after this remarkable achievement, CheilJedang recorded KRW 1 trillion in sales in 1991 for the first time in the industry, occupying 6.25% of the KRW 16 trillion Korean food industry at that time. The only companies that ranked higher than CheilJedang in terms of sales were general trading, automobile, heavy industry, construction and oil refining companies.
With this astounding sales record achieved, CheilJedang’s growth signaled a new era for the food industry as well as Korean manufacturing. Since the company recorded KRW 500 million in sales from sugar manufacturing in 1952, the company had achieved massive growth in 38 years.
In 1993, on its 40th anniversary, CheilJedang declared its independence from the Samsung Group. “We will grow into a global lifestyle and culture company in the early 21st century,” CheilJedang’s ambition was revealed during the ceremony held for the independence management.
