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GOLDSEA 100
No. 3: James J Kim
Amkor Technology Inc
ilial piety lies at the heart of James J Kim's Asian American success story. To this day he might have stayed a college econ prof if he hadn't left his Villanova teaching post in 1968 to help sign up American customers for his father's struggling electronics company, Anam Electronics of Corea. As the eldest son, James saw little choice and founded Amkor Technology to act as Anam's U.S. sales agent. Its first decade was an unending struggle to keep together body and soul.
"We were always struggling to make payroll," recalls Memma Kilgannon, who was Kim's secretary for twenty years since the mid 70s.
James's wife Agnes pitched in by selling transistor radios and calculators from a kiosk in a shopping mall in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania in 1977 -- but that's another GoldSea 100 success story in its own right, Number 11, to be exact.
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In the two decades since, the Kim clan's fortunes have risen dramatically. By 1998 Amkor had grown into the world's leading independent fabricator, making chips and ICs for the likes of Texas Instruments, Motorola, Philips and Toshiba in wafer fabrication and testing plants located in Corea, the Phillipines, Idaho, California, Arizona and Texas. Despite a slump in the overall semiconductor packaging industry, for 1998 Amkor managed to raise revenues 10% to $1.6 billion, on which it earned net income of $71 million.
Amkor's success helped make Anam one of Corea's top 20 business groups. When Kim's father retired in 1990 James began doing trans-Pacific double-duty, chairing the Anam group in Seoul as well as Amkor Technology in West Chester, Pennsylvania. In May of 1998 Amkor became a NASDAQ public company with an IPO that raised about $450 million for 37% of its shares. Amkor's current market cap is $1.2 billion of which James Kim and his family own over 60%.
James Kim was born in 1936 in Corea. He came to the U.S. in 1955 as an undergraduate economics major at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He taught six years as an assistant professor at Villanova before founding Amkor. He and Agnes have 3 adult children. Son John, the youngest at age 30, works as an Amkor executive. Pere Kim enjoys golf but has little time to play. Among Amkor's 10,000 employees he's known as a genial, softspoken boss but those working more closely know he isn't above losing his temper on occasion.
| "We were always struggling to make payroll." |