It’s no secret that carmakers are brilliant at bending metal and tuning chassis, but painfully bad at writing computer code. The companies that build our phones and the companies that build our cars have treated each other with cautious suspicion for many years – nowhere was that frostier than in South Korea. Samsung and the Hyundai Motor Group used to operate in parallel universes for generations, competing for talent and national prestige, and carefully avoiding deep entanglement. That corporate standoff has officially ended at a training center in Seocheon, where the two industrial giants declared themselves a single team.
The HMG Appreciation Day looked on paper like a corporate mixer. One hundred and seventy-seven executives and spouses watched a seventy-minute orchestral performance with cellist Han Jae-min and traded compliments about three generations of shared industrial history.
