Steel production pioneer Chung Myung-sik dies at 90
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Update time : 2021-01-20 19:42:14
Chung Myung-sik, former chairman of steelmaker Posco, died Tuesday at age 90.
The third chairman in the steel company’s 52-year history, Chung is credited with leading the construction of Posco production facilities in Korea, which were also the first steel factories in the country.
Born in Seoul in 1931, Chung graduated from Seoul National University in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. Four years later, he received a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Chung was serving as chief executive of the state-owned Korea Engineering Consultants when he was called in to work for the steelmaker by company founder Park Tae-jun in 1970. At the time, Korea was still emerging from post-war poverty and was starting to develop into an industrialized country.
For the next 20 years, Chung managed the construction of the company’s production sites in Pohang and Gwangyang, South Jeolla — an unprecedented project for a country which had very few skilled engineers at the time.
Reflecting on his career in a 2014 interview, Chung said that Korea’s level of construction technology at that time was not even close to what was required to build a steel factory from scratch.
