Shin Kyuk-ho
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| Shin Kyuk-Ho | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Korean name | |||||||
| Hangul | 신격호 | ||||||
| Hanja | 辛格浩 | ||||||
| |||||||
| Japanese name | |||||||
| Kanji | 重光 武雄 | ||||||
Shin Kyuk-Ho (born 4 October, 1922) founded the Lotte company 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, and 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 Forbes Magazine, Shin was 387th on The World's Richest People list in 2005, and moved up to 136th place in 2006.[1] He currently resides in South Korea for odd months and in Japan for even months.[citation needed]
Shin started his company two years after graduating from Waseda Jitsugyo high School (早稲田実業学校) in Tokyo.