Lotte (conglomerate)

Lotte
Korean name
Hangul 롯데
Revised Romanization Rotde
McCune-Reischauer Rotte
Japanese name
Katakana ロッテ
Hepburn Rotte
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese 樂天
Simplified Chinese 乐天
Hanyu Pinyin lètīan

Lotte Co., Ltd. is a South Korean-Japanese Jaebeol (conglomerate) and one of the largest food and shopping groups in South Korea and Japan. Lotte was established in June 1948, in Tokyo, by Japanese-educated, Korean businessman Shin Kyuk-Ho (신격호) – also known as Takeo Shigemitsu (重光武雄 Shigemitsu Takeo?). After the normalization of Japan–Korea relations in 1965, Lotte expanded into Korea with the establishment of Lotte Confectionary Co., Ltd in Seoul on April 3, 1967.

Lotte Group consists of over 60 business units employing 60,000 people engaged in such diverse industries as candy manufacturing, beverages, hotels, fast food, retail, financial services, heavy chemicals, electronics, IT, construction, publishing, and entertainment. Lotte's major operations are overseen by Shin Kyuk-Ho's family in South Korea and Japan, with additional businesses in China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, USA, Russia, Philippines, Pakistan and Poland (Lotte bought Poland's largest candy company Wedel from Kraft Foods in June 2010). Today, Lotte is the largest candy / chewing gum manufacturer in both South Korea and Japan, and is one of South Korea's largest conglomerates.

Contents

Management

Lotte Holdings Co., Ltd. – Lotte group's world headquarters – are located in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It is controlled by the founder Shin Kyuk-Ho's family.

Lotte Group's total assets are approximately 50 billion USD (Lotte Korea $40 Billion, Lotte Japan $10 Billion).

Business

Lotte group's major businesses are food products, shopping, finance, construction, amusement parks, hotels, trade, oil and sports.

Sports

Lotte also owns professional baseball teams

Lotte R&D Center

History

Lotte's first company was founded in June 1948 in Tokyo, Japan by a Korean businessman, Shin Kyuk-Ho (신격호, 辛格浩), also known by his Japanese name, Shigemitsu Takeo (重光 武雄) two years after graduating from Waseda Jitsugyo high School (早稲田実業学校). Originally called Lotte Co., Ltd, the company has grown from selling chewing gum to children in post-war Japan to becoming a major multinational corporation.

Name

The source of the company's name is neither Korean nor Japanese, but German. Shin was impressed with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and named his newly-founded company Lotte after the character Charlotte in the novel ("Charlotte" is also the name of a new brand of deluxe movie theatres run by Lotte). Lotte's current marketing slogan in Japan is お口の恋人ロッテ (o-kuchi no koibito Lotte), which is translated as "your palate's sweetheart, Lotte".

See also

References

External links