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Tongyang Securities

Tongyang Group
Tongyang logo (english).svg
Hangul
Hanja
Revised Romanization Dong-yang Geurup
McCune–Reischauer Tong'yang Gŭrup

The Tongyang Group, also spelled Tong Yang Group, is a South Korean Enterprise Group founded in 1957 by Lee Yang-gu, a confectionery businessman who had decided to expand into the cement industry. Over the following decades it expanded to include holdings as diverse as financial services companies and a basketball team. As of September 2013, it was the country's 38th-largest conglomerate, but that month it defaulted on its debt due to cash flow issues, and looked to sell off key subsidiaries to raise funds. In January 2014, group chairman Hyun Jae-hyun and three other senior executives were arrested on charges including fraud and malpractice in issuance and sales of financial products.

The Tongyang Group was founded in 1957 as a cement manufacturer by Lee Yang-gu. Lee had previously used the Tongyang name in his Tongyang Confectionery Manufacturing Company, which he started after coming from his native South Hamgyong Province (in what is today North Korea) to Seoul in 1947. His commercial success led to his being dubbed the "Sugar King", and he used his own capital to take over a cement factory in Samcheok, Gangwon-do; its owners at the time were eager to sell due to frequent labour disputes and the poor state of the physical plant. That factory had started operations in 1942 under the ownership of Onoda Cement during Japanese colonial rule over Korea. Lee searched out former Onoda engineers in order to rehire them, in particular Oh Pyong-ho, "supposedly the only competent cement engineer in post-colonial South Korea"; Oh accepted the job offer. Lee then began repairs to the facilities with the aid of engineers from Germany's Polysius Company, resolved the labour disputes, and revamped the recruiting programmes; he hired heavily from the local Samcheok High School, and many of his new hires' fathers had worked for Onoda in the past.

The South Korean cement industry experienced a boom in the mid-1970s. Hyun Jae-hyun, the husband of Lee Yang-gu's eldest daughter Lee Hae-kyung, abandoned his previous career as a prosecutor to join Tongyang Cement in 1977, and oversaw the Tongyang Group's expansion from cement into a wide variety of other fields, particularly in financial services in the 1980s. He was promoted to group chairman in 1989. By 2009, financial services subsidiaries such as Tongyang Life Insurance and Tongyang Securities contributed more than seven-tenths of the Tongyang Group's sales.


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