Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook (right) shakes hands with J.K. Shin (left), co-chief executive of Samsung Electronics as he leaves Samsung’s headquarters in June 2013.
- Bloomberg News
That’s triggered a flurry of speculation about what Zuckerberg may be up to here — did he meet with Samsung heir Jay Y. Lee, for instance? Was the Facebook CEO here to discuss Oculus VR, perhaps? (The virtual reality company, acquired by Facebook in March, has partnered with Samsung on wearable devices.) To hear Samsung tell it, it was all far more innocent.
While Zuckerberg indeed did meet with Samsung mobile chief J.K. Shin to chat about the state of the industry and the two companies’ “DNA of success,” according to Samsung, the Facebook chief also took time out to visit Samsung’s new innovation museum.
According to Samsung, Zuckerberg showed interest in the company’s rapid ascent to the top of the heap in the competitive electronics industry, despite jumping into the fray just four decades ago.
Facebook didn’t issue a statement of its own and spokeswoman declined to comment.
Samsung, for its part, didn’t get into any details about what business the two companies may have been discussing.
Instead, it devoted the majority of its statement on the Facebook visit to the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, whose book “Lean In” last year sparked a conversation around the world about women and pursuing their ambitions.
According to Samsung’s account, Sandberg met with Lee Young-hee, one of the company’s few prominent woman executives, as well as a handful of other high-ranking women at the company, to share her thoughts on women, work and leadership.
Sandberg called on working women to be more confident and active, noting that while women have made remarkable advances over the past 100 years, that progress has slowed to a virtual halt, she told the executives, according to Samsung’s report.
Those words would resonate in South Korea, which has its first ever woman president in office, but whose women remain generally under-represented in the upper echelons of the corporate world.
That’s especially true at Samsung, which in August released data showing that just 26.8% of its employees in Korea are women — a figure that has been on a steady decline in recent years.
The number of women employees has been falling broadly across Samsung’s biggest markets, including North America, Europe and China, the data shows.
Even more striking, a mere 3.8% of the company’s executives are women. That’s more than double the 1.5% figure in 2012, but still far short of the company’s long-term goal of 10%.
by DCS collaboration with ELE BLAQUE THE MOVEMENT
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