Trip to the U.S. for the Sun Valley Conference
Gathering of Global Business Heavyweights
Possible Meetings with Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates
An Event Attended Since His Executive Director Days in 2002
No Attendance Since 2017 Due to Legal Risks
Lee Jae-yong, Chairman of Samsung Electronics, will attend the Sun Valley Conference, a social gathering of global business heavyweights.
According to the business community on July 9, Chairman Lee is reported to have arrived in the United States to attend the event, which will be held from July 9 to 13 (local time) at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho.
The event is an international business conference hosted annually in early July by the U.S. investment bank Allen & Company since 1983. Although it is a private event, it is often called a "billionaires' social club" because major figures from the global media and IT industries are key invitees.
According to foreign media outlets such as Variety, this year's attendees include Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft; Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta; Tim Cook, CEO of Apple; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google; and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
As Samsung Electronics is facing difficulties due to sluggish performance in its core businesses such as semiconductors, attention is focused on whether Chairman Lee will accelerate his global management activities at Sun Valley.
Chairman Lee has consistently attended this event every year since 2002, when he was an executive director at Samsung Electronics. Notably, in 2014, he met with Apple's CEO Cook at Sun Valley, and afterward, Samsung Electronics and Apple withdrew their smartphone patent lawsuits outside the United States. While he was in custody in 2017, Chairman Lee stated in court, "Sun Valley is the busiest and most important business trip of the year for me."
However, it is known that he was unable to attend the Sun Valley Conference from 2017 due to investigations, trials, and imprisonment related to the "state affairs manipulation case." Chairman Lee, who was acquitted in the first and second trials after being indicted on charges of unfair merger and accounting fraud, is awaiting the Supreme Court's final ruling on July 17.
There is also speculation that Chairman Lee, along with other leaders of major Korean conglomerates such as SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, may attend another global CEO social gathering, "Google Camp," to be held later this month. Google Camp is an event hosted every summer by Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at the Rocco Forte Verdura Golf Resort in southern Sicily, Italy. All details about the attendees and the event are kept strictly confidential.
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