Gene Yoon, center, sits next to Michele Scannavinim, left, the then CEO of Fila Holdings Italy in this undated photo. / Korea Times file
By Kim Da-ye
“Why I Get an Annual Salary of 1.8 Billion Won” by Gene Yoon (Chosun, 277 pages, 6,500 won, discontinued)
In a low husky voice, he was unafraid of talking about failures in his life and making comments on sensitive matters. After each candid — and even blunt — remark, he would say, “You gotta be honest. You shouldn’t lie.” He then laughed.
An hour with him still wasn’t enough — he nowadays constantly travels and rarely gives interviews — so the discovery of his autobiography published in 1997 was tremendously fortunate.
The book titled “Why I get an annual salary of 180 million won” was discontinued a long time ago, and a rare copy was found at a second-hand book shop. It was ironically near the Seoul National University, Yoon’s nemesis whose medical school rejected his applications three times.
The tell-all autobiography explained every point Yoon made during the interview. The title may come across as too proud, but the book is more of an honest account of failures he has made (In 1996, Yoon was ranked among the top 100 income tax payers in Korea and reluctantly revealed his salary following inquiries by the media).
The book narrates Yoon’s life from his birth in 1945 to 1997 when he was the president of Fila Korea and was thriving.
Yoon writes that his 20s was a dark time marked by failing to get into Seoul National. He briefly worked at a shipping company and moved to J.C. Penny, a U.S. chain of department stores, in 1975
At J.C. Penny, assigned to discover “hard-line” products to export to the U.S., Yoon came up with an idea of shipping microwaves that no Korea manufacturers could produce back then. The jaw-dropping story goes that Yoon, in collaboration with Samsung Electronics, reassembled a Japanese microwave, got it approved by J.C. Penny and eventually succeeded in helping Samsung mass-produce its own microwaves.
He had cheeky strategies including camouflaging Samsung’s electric fan plant into one that manufactured microwaves when an American engineer visited Korea for an on-site inspection before the approval. It now sounds scandalous, but well, it was the seventies.
One of the heart-wrenching failures he managed to narrate with so much humor is botched exports of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial dolls.
At his next employer, Hwaseung, Yoon proposed making dolls of the popular E.T. character from the 1982 Steven Spielberg film and exporting them to the U.S. He did not know that a company is required to obtain a license to do so.
By the time six containers carrying E.T. dolls worth $180,000 arrived in the U.S., he received a call from customs that said the license for E.T. dolls belonged to someone else. Hwaseung ended up burning all of the exports, but had already been mass-producing them at a dedicated factory. That year and the following year, E.T. dolls flooded handcarts of street vendors, Yoon recalls.
The highlight of the book is, of course, how he became the head of Fila Korea after more heartbreaking failures. Italian sports apparel maker Fila neither had a branch in Korea nor produced shoes until Yoon approached the brand. Yoon did not find a job in Fila Korea, but founded Fila Korea.
After seeing Fila’s clothes in the U.S., he hoped to get a license for making their sports shoes but realized that someone else has taken the license in the U.S. The person was Homer Altice, whom Yoon got to work closely with.
Yoon recalls that Altice initially had wrong business ideas about pricing the shoes too high, starting with too little capital and giving unreasonably high interest to the lender at a whopping 22 percent of revenue. When Yoon quit Hwaseung and launched his company, he visited Fila’s headquarters in Biella, Italy, to obtain the license to operate in Korea, but was rejected.
Months later, however, Altice contacted him, saying that he was struggling and mulling to give up the business.
Yoon convinced Altice to meet with Chung Young-woo, a classmate from Seoul High School who then headed the New York branch of SsangYong Group’s trading company, as a potential financing partner.
Chung didn’t show up in the first meeting, and Yoon begged Altice for another chance. He even cried.
Finally, Yoon convinced Altice. He arranged the production of Fila shoes in Korea, SsangYong supported Altice financially and logistically and Altice ran the U.S. branch of Fila. Yoon took 3 percent of the revenue as agency fees, but continued to try establishing his own businesses. Some of the products he produced and sold as sidelines were toy helicopters, water heating systems and electric carts for the disabled.
Altice later sold his license back to the Italian holiding company who appointed Yoon as the head of its Korean operation in 1991.
Fila and Yoon jointly set up the Korean operation. The holding company wanted Yoon to have a 45 percent stake, but he did not have enough money. Instead, he took a 10 percent stake and received $1.6 million of annual salary. The rest is history.
The book is an inspiring confession for those who want to shape their own destinies and become entrepreneurs. It will make you laugh, weep and learn what it takes for someone to reach the position where Yoon is.
Unfortunately, this book isn’t likely to be released again in a second edition. It would be best to remain as a relic from an analogue age when people had little access to the Internet and didn’t make too much fuss about one famous person’s opinion.
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