When executives announced the 10-year plan in late 2009, the vision was an ambitious one in keeping with the elder Mr. Lee’s legacy. The $400 billion revenue goal would give Samsung roughly the combined 2014 revenues of Apple, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. (Samsung’s 2014 revenue was 206.21 trillion won, about $190 billion.)

In typical fashion, Samsung blanketed the market with multiple cheap runescape gold  variations, with parts coming from factories in South Korea, China and Vietnam. Prices ranged from entry-level handsets to high-end smartphones that could compete with iPhones. Almost all ran Google’s Android operating system. Every few months, Samsung released a wave of updated models.

The Samsung Group got its start as a dried-fish exporter in 1938. Its founder, Mr. Lee’s father, turned it into a conglomerate of roughly 70 companies from life insurance to construction the biggest of the giant chaebols that dominated as the country rebuilt after the Korean War.

The group’s electronics company its crown jewel built vast factories that produced inexpensive products it introduced at the low end of well-established markets. After he took over, Mr. Lee, the founder’s third son, accelerated its push into markets dominated by Japanese companies like Sony Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., much as Japanese firms had taken on U.S. companies a generation earlier.

On a 1993 world trip, according to the company history, Mr. Lee saw how poorly Samsung’s products were perceived overseas and vowed to change that. He drove his point home that year by burning 150,000 glitchy Samsung cellphones before 2,000 employees.

Samsung invested billions of dollars to bulk up on one technology after another. www.rsfarmer.com  It became a dominant supplier of certain computer chips as it caught up with Japanese makers and bet big and early on liquid-crystal displays.