Shin Kyuk-ho (4 October 192119 January 2020), known in Japan as Takeo Shigemitsu, was a South Korean businessman known for being the founder of the Korean conglomerate Lotte Corporation.
Career
Shin was born in Ulsan, Japanese Korea in 1922. In 1941, he stowed away on a ship to Japan, where he studied chemical engineering at Waseda University. He opened a rice cooker manufacturing plant in 1942. After the plant was destroyed during an air raid, he founded Lotte in 1948, which grew from selling chewing gum to becoming a major multinational corporation.
In 2006, Shin and his family were ranked 136th on Forbes magazine's list, "The World's Billionaires." In 2009, Shin was ranked 38th on the magazine's list of South Korea's richest people. Lotte itself was South Korea's fifth largest conglomerate as of 2017.
In June 2017, he retired from his role as board director of Lotte Holdings Co. after holding the position for nearly 70 years.
In December 2017, he was sentenced to four years in prison after he was convicted of embezzling 128.6 billion won (119 million USD) from Lotte. However, Shin was allowed to remain free given his poor health.
Personal life
Shin had a total of four children from three marriages. His first wife, Noh Soon-hwa, died in 1951. They have one daughter, Shin Young-ja (born 1942). Shin then married a Japanese woman, Hatsuko Shigemitsu, in 1952. They have two sons, Shin Dong-joo (born 1954) and Shin Dong-bin (born 1955). Shin is also married to Seo Mi-Kyung in South Korea under the country's common-law marriage system. They have one daughter, Shin Yu-mi (born 1983).