Comment by WaxProlix

They've been around in one form or another since the early 80s, and have been in and out of a few of the major chaebols in that time. I wouldn't call them privately owned in the western sense, necessarily. There's no institutional investment behind the chaebols themselves generally, they're 'owned' by a single family and passed down hereditarily, and are nationalistic in a certain sense; they're much more closely ingrained with both government and state identity than most western corps.