KT Chairman Lee Suk-chae has won the 2013 Korea Management Award from the Korea Management Association (KMA) for his leading roles in expanding the telecom provider into a global media distribution group beyond the telecommunications field at an award ceremony at the Grand Hyatt Seoul on May 15. 

The award also went to Samyang Holdings Chairman Kim Yoon and SINDOH Chairman Woo Suk-hyung.

KT Chairman Lee has been credited with expanding KT’s business environs to the virtual goods market, based on powerful fixed and mobile broadband foundations, which is emerging as a new bread-winner, since his inauguration in 2009.

With the goal of becoming a  ‘global ICT convergence leader’, KT has been strengthening its capacity in the non-telecommunications field under the leadership of KT Chairman Lee. His efforts have paid off: KT witnessed the group’s sales and operating profit in the non-telecommunications field to 6.93 trillion won and 400 billion won in 2012, representing a 252 percent surge and a 381 percent jump over 2009, respectively.

Chairman Lee has been stepping on the gas to create jobs. KT has been hiring freshmen employees. In particular, the nation’s second largest telecom provider has hired more than 300 employees out of high school graduates annually by creating a new job classification category for high school graduates. For the past four years after his inauguration, Chairman Lee has hired a combined13,000 freshmen employees.

Lee was presented with the Asia Talent Management Award in recognition for introducing smart working and creative management methods as well as gifted manpower management. 

KT Chairman Lee’s corporate social responsibility activities are extraordinary. Lee is always a participant of such CRS events, including a ceremony to inaugurate IT supporters’ groups under a program to provide support to the elderly seeking jobs and social activities. 

He won the Asia Business Leaders Awards (ABLA) at an award ceremony at the Siam Kempinski Hotel Bangkok last Nov. 16 for his superb entrepreneurship and innovative management. 

Lee  has been pulling out all the stops to reform KT since he took the helm at the nation’s largest fixed line and high-speed internet service provider.

Six days later after his inauguration, Lee moved quickly to declare KT’s merger with its subsidiary KTF, Korea’s second largest mobile service provider.

A former minister of information and telecommunications under the Kim Young-sam government, Lee is still putting the screws on breaking the mold. Lee’s reform has surpassed the depth of changes KT has undergone since its privatization.

Lee called for his executives and staff members to be on an emergency management footing with a focus on nurturing a master’s spirit and ensuring innovation and efficiency. In a bid to inject a new blood into the organization, CEO Lee replaced his top brass with outside experts, including a prosecutor, a journalist, an applied mathematician and a cosmetics marketing expert. Lee’s replacement of KT’s top brass with outside experts is designed to graft creative ideas into the telecommunications sector, industry analysts said. He has also conducted a massive reorganization of the consolidated KT.