Part IThe Story
In the autumn of 2021, the most popular release in Netflix's history opened with a laid-off auto worker running from his creditors. Seong Gi-hun, the protagonist of Squid Game, is a casualty of a car company's collapse, a man with a string of failed small businesses behind him. Early in the first episode, black-suited lenders force him to sign a pledge: if he cannot repay within a month, he will surrender a kidney and an eye. Foreign audiences took the scene for dystopian flourish. Korean audiences, the Los Angeles Times reported that October, recognized it as something closer to documentary. The country's illegal private lenders were then charging desperate borrowers annualized interest of around 210 percent, ten times the legal cap of 20, and collecting it in person.
Seventeen years before the show aired, a laid-off auto man of a different kind signed something similar, and he meant it.
His name was Seo Jung-jin. In 2004 he was forty-six years old, a former adviser to Daewoo Motor whose employer had been dismantled in the wreckage of the Asian financial crisis. He was running a two-year-old drug company in Incheon whose vaccine clinical trials had just failed. The banks were not interested. So he went to the loan sharks and, as Bloomberg later put it in a sentence his company never disputed, pledged his organs to get the money his upstart drugmaker needed. The detail first appeared in a 2012 Financial Times article, and a Celltrion spokesman confirmed it. The terms are not in the public record: which organs, at what rate, for how long. Neither is the sum. What is in the record is the outcome. The organs stayed where they were. The company survived. By the summer of 2021, Forbes was reporting that the man who had once offered his own body as collateral was the richest person in South Korea, the first self-made billionaire in the republic's history to displace the heirs of Samsung and Hyundai from the top of the list.
It is a good story, and Seo has let it be told many times. It is also, if you sit with it long enough, a slightly strange one. The pledge of the body was not the last thing he put up as collateral. It was the first, and probably the most honest. In the decades that followed, Seo Jung-jin would pledge his shares to finance his affiliates, pledge his reputation against short sellers, pledge his retirement against a pandemic, and pledge, repeatedly and in public, that the company he built would not become the thing every great Korean company becomes. Some of those pledges he redeemed. Some he defaulted on.
By the Numbers
The Celltrion Ledger
₩50MStarting capital Seo cites for the venture that became Celltrion (2000)
2013Year Remsima became the first biosimilar monoclonal antibody approved by the EMA
74%Remsima product group's market share in Europe's five largest markets, Q4 2023 (IQVIA)
412 of 432Trading days with short selling of Celltrion stock, 2011–2013
₩4.16TCelltrion revenue, 2025
₩1.17TCelltrion operating income, 2025
2,995Employees, 2025
Briquettes, a Taxi, and the Productivity Men
The family sold coal briquettes.
Anyone who lived through South Korea's postwar decades does not need the image explained. The perforated cylinders of compressed anthracite, the yeontan, heated the ondol floors of working-class homes for a generation. They were cheap, they burned for hours, and they occasionally killed whole families in their sleep with carbon monoxide. Seo was born on October 23, 1957, in Cheongju, a provincial capital in North Chungcheong Province, and grew up in the trade. He finished high school at Jemulpo High School in Incheon, the port city where he would later build his company. He then put himself through Konkuk University in Seoul by driving a taxi.
He studied industrial engineering, the most unglamorous of the engineering disciplines and in some ways the most Korean. It is the science of time-and-motion studies, assembly-line balancing, and squeezing four more units an hour out of a factory floor. He followed it with a master's degree at Konkuk; sources disagree over whether it was in industrial engineering or business administration, which may tell you how little the distinction mattered to him. In 1983 he joined Samsung. The posting was unremarkable, and he did not stay.
The more consequential move was sideways, into the consulting apparatus Korea built for itself during its industrial sprint. Seo became an expert member of the Korea Productivity Center, the quasi-public institution that sent engineers into the country's factories to make them faster, and later headed the Korea Quality Management Institute. He was, in other words, a productivity man: a professional diagnostician of other people's operations, paid to walk into a plant, watch for a week, and explain where the waste was. While consulting for Daewoo Motor on the Center's behalf, he impressed the carmaker enough that it recruited him as an adviser to its planning and finance department.
Daewoo was then the most audacious of the chaebol. Its founder, Kim Woo-choong, had built a textile trading house into a sprawling empire on leverage and nerve, and its automotive arm was expanding into Eastern Europe and Central Asia as though the 1990s would never end. They ended in 1997. When the Asian financial crisis arrived and the International Monetary Fund imposed its conditions on Seoul, Daewoo Group collapsed under its debts in what remains one of the largest corporate failures in Korean history. The planning and finance adviser was out of a job.
He was past forty, with a family and no inheritance. The country around him was in a kind of national convulsion: citizens donating their gold rings to help pay down the sovereign debt, the chaebol model briefly discredited. A substantial number of educated, mid-career salarymen discovered at the same moment that lifetime employment had been a promise, not a contract.
What Seo did next was organize the unemployed. In 1999 he founded a consultancy called Nexol with a group of former Daewoo Motor colleagues. One account counts ten of them, EY's counts five, and Seo has said little to settle it. The capital, by Seo's own telling to the Maeil Business Newspaper, was 50 million won. EY's account rendered it as about $45,000. Nexol's purpose was loosely defined, "to explore business opportunities," in Bloomberg's phrasing, which is what a group of laid-off planners says when it does not yet know what it is planning.
Many founding stories have a pivot. In Seo's, the pivot came before there was anything to pivot from. A room of out-of-work Daewoo men, trained in the operational efficiency of car plants, went looking for an industry, and the one they chose was biotechnology. None of them were biologists.
A Wager on Old Age
Seo's reasoning, as he has described it, was demographic before it was scientific. In the early 2000s, the most expensive drugs in the world were biologics: large, complex proteins grown in living cells, monoclonal antibodies that could calm a rheumatoid joint or starve a breast tumor. They were patented, and they were priced accordingly. Their patents would eventually expire. When they did, someone would be permitted to make copies. And the societies that most needed those copies, the rich and rapidly aging nations of Europe, North America, and East Asia, were going to need more of them every year, at prices their health systems could not sustain.
That was the whole bet: aging populations would need cheaper alternatives to costly medicines, and somebody would have to make them.
The copies had a name, eventually: biosimilars. The name carries an admission. A conventional generic drug is chemically identical to its branded original, a small molecule you can specify atom by atom. A biologic cannot be copied that way. It is grown, not synthesized; its final structure depends on the cell line, the culture conditions, the purification process. Two batches of the original are not perfectly identical. A copy can only ever be similar: close enough in structure, potency, and clinical effect that regulators will accept it as interchangeable for practical purposes. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration would later wrestle in public with how to describe degrees of resemblance. Its draft guidance offered a ladder that ascended from "not similar" through "highly similar" to "highly similar with fingerprint-like similarity." Industry observers noted, a little wearily, that no two biologics could be that similar.
For a group of process engineers, the problem was oddly congenial. The science of a biosimilar is substantial but bounded; the target is known in advance. What separates success from failure is manufacturing: reproducing, at industrial scale and to the most exacting regulatory standards on earth, a molecule that a multinational spent a decade perfecting. That is a productivity problem with unusually high stakes.
Celltrion was incorporated in February 2002 as a joint venture between Nexol Biotech and VaxGen, an American vaccine developer. The vaccine partnership is the part of the story that gets told least, because it went worst. The vaccine trials failed, and by 2004 the young company was in financial trouble serious enough to send its founder to the private lenders. Every later account of Seo's genius has to pass through that year, when the most plausible outcome for Celltrion was that it would become one more casualty of the Korean venture bust and its founder one more defaulting borrower in a country that, as the Squid Game reporting reminds us, has never been gentle with defaulting borrowers.
What saved the company, in the interim, was a factory. Celltrion had built mammalian cell-culture facilities in Incheon designed to meet the FDA's current good manufacturing practice standards and the European Medicines Agency's GMP requirements. They were built, in effect, to a standard the company had no products yet to justify. On December 18, 2007, Reuters reported that the FDA had cleared Celltrion to manufacture Orencia, a rheumatoid arthritis biologic, for Bristol-Myers Squibb. It was contract work, the industrial equivalent of a carpenter building furniture to someone else's design. It was also proof, stamped by the most demanding regulator in the world, that a company founded by laid-off car-industry planners in Incheon could grow a monoclonal antibody to American standards.
The company listed on KOSDAQ, Korea's tech-heavy junior exchange, in 2008. Nexol and Celltrion signed a global distribution agreement the same year. The next year Nexol changed its name to Celltrion Healthcare, and the architecture that would define and eventually haunt the group was in place: one company to make the drugs, another to sell them, and Seo Jung-jin at the top of both. By 2010, Celltrion was profitable.
The Copy That Giants Could Not Dream Of
There is a short letter, signed "Jungjin Seo, Chairman, Celltrion Group," on the corporate website of Celltrion Pharm, the generic-drug maker the group absorbed in 2009. It reads like a mission statement written by someone who distrusts mission statements:
Our beginning was humble. We started with a dream. A dream to benefit patients with affordable drugs. While the other Korean pharmaceutical companies focused on the domestic market, we looked out into the world.
And then, a few lines later, the sentence that is the real point: We created and led the world's first "antibody biosimilar market," a market that even the world's multinational pharmaceutical giants could not dream of starting.
The phrasing is boastful, but it is not wrong. The multinationals could not start that market, at least not easily. A Johnson & Johnson or a Roche making biosimilars of its own franchise drugs would be cannibalizing itself; making biosimilars of a rival's drugs would invite reciprocal assault on its own. The incumbent's portfolio functioned as a hostage. A company with no portfolio at all had no hostages to lose.
The drug Celltrion chose for its first assault was infliximab, sold by Johnson & Johnson as Remicade, a monoclonal antibody against tumor necrosis factor alpha used for rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, psoriatic arthritis, and psoriasis. Korea's drug regulator approved Celltrion's version, Remsima, in 2012. On June 27, 2013, the European Medicines Agency's scientific committee issued its assessment, and that September Reuters ran the headline the company had been building toward for a decade: Europe approves first biosimilar antibody drug. No company anywhere had done it before. Remsima was the world's first biosimilar monoclonal antibody to clear the EMA.
Korea's national industrial story had been, for half a century, a story of second movers who outworked first movers: steel after the Japanese, ships after the Japanese, semiconductors after the Americans and the Japanese. Celltrion's founding premise was to be a second mover by definition, a maker of copies. With Remsima the copier was suddenly first. It was first into a market that only existed because someone else had invented the drug, but first.
The follow-ons came quickly by pharmaceutical standards. Herzuma, a biosimilar of Roche's breast-cancer drug trastuzumab (Herceptin), was approved in Korea on January 15, 2014, for HER2-positive breast cancer and metastatic gastric cancer. Truxima, the first biosimilar of rituximab, an antibody against the CD20 marker on B-cells used in non-Hodgkin lymphoma, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and rheumatoid arthritis, won EMA approval in February 2017. By then the incumbents had stopped pretending not to notice. At a JPMorgan conference in early 2016, Roche's chief financial officer, Alan Hippe, looked ahead to 2018, when three of his company's biologics would lose patent protection, MabThera, Herceptin, and Avastin among them. "The biosimilar impact is coming," he said. Two of those three had already been copied in Incheon.
What made the copies matter commercially was not only the science but the distribution, and here Seo's early years as a consultant showed. Celltrion did not try to build a global salesforce from nothing. It rented other people's. In 2009 Hospira took distribution across the Americas, Oceania, and Europe. In 2010 came Nippon Kayaku in Japan and Egis across the Commonwealth of Independent States, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. In 2013 Mundipharma, Biogaran, and Kern were added in Europe. When Celltrion's Remicade biosimilar went before an FDA advisory panel in February 2016, the panel voted overwhelmingly in its favor, and the company had already signed Pfizer to market it in the United States.
By the end of 2023, according to IQVIA figures cited in the Korean financial press, the Remsima product group held 74 percent of the infliximab market across Europe's five largest economies. It had overtaken Remicade in its own category.
Four Hundred and Twelve Days
A company whose business is producing near-perfect copies attracts a particular kind of suspicion: that the numbers, too, might be only similar to the truth.
Through 2011 and 2012, Celltrion became the most heavily shorted stock in Korea. The Korea Times later counted: of 432 trading days over the two years leading into 2013, Celltrion's shares were sold short on 412. In 2012 alone, short sellers sold more than 8 million shares. Seo, who then held about 30 percent of Celltrion directly, 35 percent of Celltrion Pharm, and 50 percent of Celltrion Healthcare, came to treat the short sellers less as market participants than as enemies. They were, in his account, speculators deliberately spreading false information to drive the price down and pocket the difference.
On April 16, 2013, he did something no Korean founder of his stature had done. He announced that he would sell his entire controlling stake in Celltrion to a multinational pharmaceutical company.
— Seo Jung-jin, April 2013I decided to sell my company to a multinational pharmaceutical company to make it a strong one that can guard off continuous suspicions and attacks by speculative investors.
The next day, Celltrion said it had retained JP Morgan to advise on the divestiture. The stake in question, 20.7 percent of Celltrion held through Celltrion Holdings, itself 97.3 percent owned by Seo, was worth about $894 million at the KOSDAQ close.
It is still hard to know how to read the announcement. It might have been a sincere act of surrender by a man exhausted by the war. It might have been a tactical maneuver designed to squeeze the shorts by implying a takeover premium. It might have been, as Seo seemed at times to suggest, both. What the sequel makes clear is that the market read it as a signal of distress. Celltrion closed at 53,900 won on March 29, 2013. On May 9 it closed at 27,950, down 6.68 percent on the day, after news broke that the Financial Supervisory Service was investigating the company and its chairman. The stock had halved in six weeks.
Celltrion insisted it had invited the investigation, asking the regulator to clear the rumors circulating in the market, and said it had received no notification of wrongdoing. By September the regulator's framing had changed. Seo was facing sanctions for allegedly manipulating his company's stock price. "We've found evidence showing Seo and some others bought shares just before the firm unveiled favorable measures for stock investors," an FSS official told the Korea Times. "Seo is also suspected of having misused his status to inflate Celltrion's stock price." The paper also reported the motive regulators suspected. Celltrion's affiliates had taken out loans backed by equity in Celltrion itself, loans they would have to repay or top up with collateral if the share price fell. The founder who had once pledged his organs had, by 2013, pledged his company's stock, and the stock had to be defended.
The Korea Times called it a dramatic fall from grace for a man "once called the living legend of the bio industry," and noted that he was "on the verge of becoming another venture company CEO who may end up in prison."
He did not go to prison. The multinational sale never happened. He remained in control, and Celltrion kept growing. Three years later, in March 2016, the suspicion returned in a new form. An anonymous outfit calling itself Ghost Raven Research published a report calling Celltrion, then valued at around $10 billion, a "massive accounting fraud" and claiming that roughly 90 percent of its revenue had been faked. The core of the argument was structural, not scientific. Nearly 98 percent of Celltrion's reported revenue came from sales to Celltrion Healthcare, the affiliated distributor. Less than 18 percent of the product Healthcare had "purchased," Ghost Raven claimed, had ever reached end customers. The rest sat in a swelling inventory. Fortune, writing up the report, reached for comparisons to Enron, Valeant, and Theranos.
The same month, the FDA advisory panel voted overwhelmingly to recommend Remsima's American approval. Pfizer had already signed on to sell it.
The two facts did not cancel each other out, and the essay a reader can write about this episode depends heavily on which one they read first. Ghost Raven's arithmetic about the related-party structure was not invented; the split between Celltrion and Celltrion Healthcare was exactly what it described. Its conclusions, that the drugs were not selling and the revenue was imaginary, did not survive the next decade, in which Remsima became the dominant infliximab in Europe. The architecture that made Celltrion look like a fraud was the same architecture Seo had designed in 1999, when a consultancy of out-of-work planners decided to become a sales company before it had anything to sell. In 2023, he would finally merge the two companies, partly to put an end to the question.
A Title, Not a King
On November 16, 2018, Seo flew first class from Los Angeles to Incheon on Korean Air. Several of his employees, returning from the same business trip, were seated in economy.
What happened next was reported four days later by the broadcaster JTBC, citing an internal Korean Air report, and it arrived in the middle of a national reckoning over gapjil, the Korean word for the abuse of power over those in a weaker position. The reckoning had been ignited, with some irony, by the heiresses of Korean Air's own founding family. According to JTBC, Seo tried to bring his economy-class employees up into first class. When the chief flight attendant blocked them, citing regulations, he lashed out. "Is your service worth a flight ticket costing 15 million won?" he reportedly asked. He complained that there were no young or pretty flight attendants to be seen. He announced that Korean Air had just lost 6 billion won in annual revenue. He ordered ramen three times, the report said, in an intentional effort to harass the crew.
Celltrion's response, posted in detail on its homepage, is a minor masterpiece of the genre. It conceded "some conversations that may sound uncomfortable" but denied any vulgar language. It insisted the ramen had been sent back only once. And it offered an explanation that, depending on one's disposition, is either touching or absurd. The chairman, the company said, usually felt sorry for flying first class while his employees sat in economy, and it was a company tradition for him to invite staff to a "resting place" for tea as a way of expressing that regret. After the warning, Seo and three employees had moved near the economy-class galley and drunk their tea there together. "Chairman Seo wants to apologize," the statement concluded, "that he failed to take into account that his behavior to prioritize his employees, who were tired from a long-distance business trip, could lead to misunderstanding from others on board."
The episode is small, and the ramen count remains disputed. But it shows clearly the contradiction that runs through Seo's public life. The man in seat 1A is a billionaire who will not be told no by a flight attendant. The man at the economy galley is a former taxi driver who cannot stand that his people are in the back. Both reports describe the same man on the same flight.
A year later, Seo told the newspaper Hankyoreh that he planned to step down from management in 2020. Staying on as chairman beyond retirement age, he said, would turn the company into a "kingdom."
— Seo Jung-jin, to Hankyoreh, 2019The chairman is a title, not a king.
It was a pointed line in a country whose economy is still organized around corporate dynasties, family-run conglomerates that, as Bloomberg's Yoojung Lee wrote, "touch almost every aspect of life in South Korea." Seo was explicitly placing himself outside that tradition. His was going to be the first great Korean company in which the founder simply left.
He was also, by then, a man of broad appetites. In January 2012 he had founded a production company, Dream E&M, later renamed Celltrion Entertainment. A biosimilar maker making television looked like vanity, and in its early years the business was tiny; as late as 2016 it reported 13 employees. But it kept producing. In April 2017 it merged with Thespis Entertainment, the management agency owned by the actor Lee Beom-soo, who became co-CEO overseeing film production and artist management. Its credits grew to include KBS drama specials, tvN's Let's Eat 3, the Netflix-associated thriller Vagabond in 2019, JTBC's Beyond Evil in 2021, and the 2019 biopic King of Cycling Uhm Bok-dong, which it distributed itself. He also served as chairman of the board of the Korea National Opera and as vice chairman of the KOSDAQ Association.
None of this is unusual for a billionaire. What is notable is how much it resembled the chaebol pattern he claimed to reject: the drift from a core industry into adjacent prestige businesses, the founder's taste shaping a portfolio. The opera board and the drama studio do not make a kingdom. Even so, by the end of the 2010s Celltrion had the lineaments of a conglomerate, and in time the Fair Trade Commission would designate it a large business group, the first bio venture so classified.
Three Hundred Antibodies
When the coronavirus arrived, Seo was preparing to leave. At the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco in January 2020, he announced that he would retire by the end of the year. Then the pandemic gave him a final project.
Celltrion had no vaccine platform. Its failed vaccine trials had nearly killed it in 2004. What it had was eighteen years of experience growing monoclonal antibodies at scale. If a recovered patient's immune system had already produced antibodies that neutralized the virus, those antibodies could in principle be found, cloned, and manufactured. It was, in a sense, the biosimilar method turned inward: instead of copying a multinational's molecule, copy the human body's.
Working with Seoul National University Hospital, Celltrion obtained blood from recovered patients, extracted the DNA encoding their antibodies, amplified it, and screened for candidates. At an online press conference in 2020, Seo announced that the company had secured a primary pool of 300 antibody candidates and was screening them further with the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Chungbuk National University. Human trials would begin in late July. "What's crucial for the development of a COVID-19 treatment is how quickly it can be developed," he said, "regardless of when the pandemic ends." He added a line that, in retrospect, carried a familiar overconfidence: "We have successfully completed the most difficult process related to the development of the COVID-19 treatment, and the remaining steps do not have many variables."
The markets loved it. Celltrion's shares rose 75 percent in 2020 and nearly fivefold over five years. In the summer of 2020, Bloomberg reported that Seo's fortune had swelled to $10 billion, making him the second-richest person in Korea behind only Samsung's Lee Kun-hee. Bloomberg's piece cast him as the leading edge of a new elite. "Boundaries between industries are getting blurry," Park Ju-gun, president of the corporate watchdog CEOScore, told the reporter. "Those who sit still with traditional businesses don't cope well with the change." The families of Hyundai Motor, SK, and Amorepacific, Bloomberg noted, had slid down the rankings. Seo declined to be interviewed for the story.
He was less reticent elsewhere. At a forum that November, he said: "I am not sure how many more years I will be working but want to go back as a startup entrepreneur and focus on blood testing." His vision was home testing for a rapidly aging country short of doctors, coupled with telemedicine. "Once the blood-testing problem is solved, there will be a service available to seven billion people around the world from Korea," he said. "I will provide such a service jointly with Amazon." Celltrion, he said, had already manufactured enough of its COVID-19 therapy to treat 100,000 people, and would supply it to the nation at production cost.
He stepped down as chairman on the last day of 2020, without a retirement ceremony. On February 5, 2021, Korea's drug regulator granted conditional approval to regdanvimab, sold as Regkirona, and it went into use as an official treatment in Korean hospitals. At the shareholders' meeting on March 26, 2021, Seo formally left the board, nineteen years after founding the company, whose market capitalization that day stood at 42.4 trillion won, tenth largest in Korea. He told shareholders that Celltrion was in export discussions with seven countries and would price the drug at about 85 percent of its competitors. The production-cost pledge, he explained, was a matter of national security as he understood it. "The biggest reason we are supplying COVID-19 medicine at production cost is to protect our nation's health," he said. Then he went further, in terms no other Korean billionaire of his generation would have used: "Social order cannot be maintained with only a small percentage of wealthy and mostly lower class citizens." "Companies strive to maximize their profitability," he added, "but they need to take responsibility for the nation's future as well." He vowed 2 trillion won to train new talent for the industry.
The same meeting contained a smaller announcement that would later matter a great deal. His elder son, Seo Jin-seok, then in his mid-thirties, joined the boards of Celltrion and Celltrion Pharm and took over his father's role as board chairman at Celltrion. His younger son, Seo Joon-seok, became an executive director at Celltrion Healthcare. The founder was careful about the framing. "Seo Jin-seok is joining the board in my place but the company's management will be led by business professionals," he said. "Dividing ownership and management may not be the ultimate answer but my goal is to realize a model close to it as possible." Day-to-day leadership went to the professional chief executives, Kee Woo-sung at Celltrion and Kim Hyoung-ki at Celltrion Healthcare.
He took the title of honorary chairman and, by his own description, left a door open. "If there are any deficiencies in management," he said, "I will be prepared to play a firefighter's role."
That June, EY named him World Entrepreneur of the Year, chosen from 45 national winners across 38 countries and territories; he was the first Korean to win in the award's twenty-one-year history. That summer, Forbes ranked him the richest person in South Korea. For a few months, the man who had pledged his organs in 2004 held the title once reserved for the heirs of the country's industrial dynasties, and he held it as a retiree.
The Firefighter Returns
He stayed away for two years. On March 28, 2023, at Celltrion's annual shareholders' meeting, Seo announced that he was coming back.
The stated reason was strategic. Celltrion's biosimilar franchise was maturing, the post-pandemic market was harsh, and the company needed to become a developer of new drugs, expanding through acquisitions if necessary. Reports that week said Celltrion had studied a possible acquisition of Baxter International's biopharma solutions unit, a deal estimated at $4 billion. The unstated reason was that the firefighter believed he could smell smoke. He returned as co-chairman of the board, and the stock responded the way Korean retail investors had trained it to respond to him: in the month after his return, Celltrion rose from around 140,000 won to 180,000.
The local press had a name for the effect, Seo Jung-jin Magic. It was the ability of one man's appearance at a microphone to move the share price of a company with thousands of employees. It is also exactly the kind of power that a founder who wanted to separate ownership from management would be expected to dissolve rather than use.
He used it. In August 2023, in a series of online briefings, he announced the merger of Celltrion and Celltrion Healthcare, collapsing the maker-seller split that had been the group's structure since 2009 and the basis of every accounting accusation since. On October 23, he appeared in person at the extraordinary shareholders' meeting, where the merger passed with 97.3 percent approval. That same day, the FDA approved Celltrion's subcutaneous infliximab, Remsima SC, which it would sell in the United States as Zymfentra. Celltrion's shares closed lower anyway.
Two days later, on October 25, Seo held a press conference in Seoul. The arithmetic behind it was unforgiving. Shareholders who opposed the merger could demand that the company buy back their shares at 150,813 won. The National Pension Service, holding 7.4 percent of Celltrion, or 10,877,643 shares, had abstained. If the pension fund exercised its rights in full, the company would need 1.64 trillion won in cash. Celltrion and Celltrion Healthcare together had about 1 trillion won in liquid assets. Everything depended on keeping the share price above the buyback threshold until the exercise window closed on November 13. On the day of the press conference, the stock opened at 149,400, rose briefly to 150,400 after Seo spoke, sagged in the afternoon, and closed at 150,100, about 700 won short of where it needed to be. BusinessKorea ran the headline: "Is 'Head-on Breakthrough' Leadership of Celltrion's Honorary Chairman Seo Jung-jin Now Facing Challenges?"
The merger went through. At the end of 2023, Seo Jin-seok became chief executive of the combined Celltrion and chairman of its board. The "business professionals" who were to lead management now shared it with the founder's son.
In January 2024, Seo returned to the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco for the first time in four years. Hundreds of companies were pitching hundreds of investors, all of them, in the conference's standard idiom, the best in the world at whatever they did. He opened by addressing that directly.
— Seo Jung-jin, J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, January 2024All the companies are bragging about 'we're the best', and I'm probably the richest person in this hotel right now. The founder and the owner are rarely the same.
The audience laughed. Then, according to the Maeil Business Newspaper's correspondent, he turned serious: "We're not here to compete to see who makes a lot of money. We met to discuss how to solve human problems." Treatments existed for many diseases, he argued, but they were so expensive that most people died anyway. The dream was a world of more biosimilars, used more widely, at lower cost. To get there, he promised to build a healthcare investment fund of 100 trillion won. The plan was to list Celltrion Holdings on Nasdaq, raise 5 trillion won in seed capital through a proper global valuation, and attract the remaining 95 trillion from foreign investors. Only about twenty funds of that size exist anywhere in the world. The newspaper's correspondent called the plan "infinitely romantic but ambitious" and said he was cheering for it anyway.
The Nasdaq listing and the 100-trillion-won fund were later dropped. So was a proposed follow-on merger between Celltrion and Celltrion Pharm, after shareholders split over the terms. Seo's targets also kept running ahead of the company's actual results. At an investor meeting in Hong Kong on November 27, 2024, he forecast 3.5 trillion won in revenue for that year, 5 trillion for 2025, and 10 trillion by 2027. Celltrion's actual 2025 revenue was 4.16 trillion won, with 1.17 trillion in operating income, the best results in its history and still nearly a trillion won short of the promise.
This is the pattern of the second act. The pronouncements are bold, and some of them are absurd. Each one is half-retracted, and each leaves behind a company larger than it was before the pronouncement. Everyone in the market knows that a Seo Jung-jin target is closer to a direction of travel than a forecast, and they buy the stock anyway.
The Other Inheritance
In May 2023, two months after his return, Seo went to the Gangnam Police Station in Seoul and filed a complaint against the mother of two of his children.
The facts that emerged, slowly and through litigation, run as follows. From 2001 to 2012, Seo had a common-law relationship with a woman identified in Korean reporting by her surname, Jo. The relationship began the year before Celltrion was incorporated and ended the year Remsima was approved in Korea. They had two daughters. Seo paid child support. In 2021, the daughters filed a paternity suit against him at the Seongnam branch of the Suwon Family Court; after a settlement, they were legally registered as his children. The episode became public in the spring of 2023, when Jo gave an interview to a broadcaster emphasizing that her children had the right to inherit. She also said that Seo had refused to meet them.
His complaint alleged that Jo had threatened him continuously from 2012 until 2023 and had extorted a total of 28.8 billion won, of which 14.3 billion was, in his account, unambiguous extortion. According to Seo's side, one of her threats was: "If you don't send the money, I will go to Incheon," meaning Celltrion's headquarters. She was accused of hanging banners criticizing him near the Celltrion building, of illegally remitting large sums abroad, and of attempting to extort a house in Nonhyeon-dong in Gangnam. On August 8, 2024, police referred Jo, then fifty-eight, to prosecutors on charges of aggravated extortion, concealment of assets abroad, and defamation.
The story would belong only in the tabloids if it had no bearing on the company, but it did. Jo owned two companies, Seorin Holdings and Seowon D&D, which the Fair Trade Commission designated in 2023 as members of the Celltrion Group. They had no shareholding ties to the other affiliates. They were classified that way solely because of their owner's relationship to the chairman. As of March 2023, Seo owned 98 percent of Celltrion Holdings, which held 20 percent of Celltrion and 24 percent of Celltrion Healthcare. Under Korean inheritance law, his daughters could sue after his death for a legally guaranteed minimum share of his estate. Legal experts told the Korea Times they expected Seo to transfer his shares to his sons while still alive, specifically to prevent his daughters from gaining shares and with them a voice in company management. When the news broke, Celltrion's affiliates fell sharply on a Wednesday, and recovered the next day once analysts concluded the governance impact would be limited.
It is uncomfortable to set this episode beside the others, and it would be dishonest not to. The man who said the chairman is a title, not a king, was now planning his estate the way a king plans a succession. The heirs were to be the sons of his marriage, not the daughters of his eleven-year second household. And he had used the state's criminal apparatus against the woman who had, in his telling, held his company's headquarters hostage for a decade.
The elder son deserves his own compression. Seo Jin-seok, born in the early 1980s, did not take the boardroom route. He studied animal resources at Seoul National University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, then earned a master's and a doctorate in biological sciences at KAIST, the country's elite science institute. He joined Celltrion in 2014. In 2017 he took his first leadership post, as chief executive of Celltrion Skincure, the group's cosmetics affiliate. He ran it for three and a half years without turning around its operating losses. "It was fun, but it was tough," he told reporters in San Francisco in January 2026, "and depending on how you look at it, I had the worst performances in career. I know I'm not the sales king or very good at sales. I'm a supporting role and there are sales kings."
It is a disarming admission, and an unusual one from a Korean heir. It also rhymes, in inverted form, with his father's story. The founder was an industrial engineer with no biology who built a biotech company. The son is a biologist with no business training who inherited one. "(Seo) does not have a (master of business administration) or any experience in legal, (investment banking) or financial sectors," a biopharmaceutical industry official told The Investor. "His expertise is rooted in R&D."
In January 2025, father and son shared the stage at the JP Morgan conference for a joint question-and-answer session, the son announcing a pipeline of antibody-drug conjugates and bispecific antibodies with thirteen investigational new drug applications targeted by 2028. In January 2026, the son stood on the main stage alone for the first time, promising more than forty biosimilars and up to sixteen new-drug filings by 2038. The Investor filed the profile under a recurring series it called "Succession Watch."
Planting New Trees
There is a video genre on Korean social media called, without irony, Seo Jung-jin Motivation. Thousands of clips circulate on short-form platforms, most of them cut from a lecture he gave at the 18th World Knowledge Forum in 2017. Its title was a question, Innovation and Change: Is It a Crisis for You, or an Opportunity?, and his answer, delivered in a voice that the clips render somewhere between a coach and a provincial uncle, was that it depends entirely on whether you are willing to work.
He has not changed the message. In an interview with Maeil Business Newspaper, he described Korea's economic malaise as a problem of inheritance. "The second and third-generation entrepreneurs inherited orchards from the first generation, but missed the timing to plant new trees," he said. "If you succeed, you want to live a comfortable life, but then the company stagnates." His prescription was a nationwide movement to work harder, modeled on the Saemaul Undong, the state-led rural mobilization of the 1970s. The reporter asked whether the legal 52-hour workweek made that impossible. Seo's reply: "Do you really think you work focused 52 hours a week?" When the reporter protested, Seo pushed further: "Look, I'll die if I concentrate for eight hours a day." He followed that, almost in the same breath, with advice to resolve labor-management disputes not by force but by each side imagining itself in the other's position.
A few months later, in June 2026, workers at Celltrion established the first union in the company's history.
The orchard image is a useful key to the last chapter, because it is what Seo has been doing since his return. In 2006 he began developing a subcutaneous version of infliximab, a formulation of the drug that patients could inject themselves rather than receive by intravenous infusion. No one had done it before. The program took about a decade to reach American regulators, and when the FDA cleared it in October 2023, it did so as a new drug, not a biosimilar. Zymfentra launched in the United States in March 2024 and signed supply contracts with pharmacy benefit managers including Express Scripts. Remsima's sales crossed 1 trillion won in 2024. According to the Korea Financial Times, it was the first single product in the 130-year history of Korea's pharmaceutical industry to do so. The copy had been improved until it was, legally, an original.
The rest of the orchard is industrial. On September 30, 2024, Celltrion completed a subsidiary in Vietnam. On October 22, 2024, it signed a 100.4-billion-won contract development and manufacturing deal with Teva for the migraine drug Ajovy, making someone else's drug as it had for Bristol-Myers seventeen years earlier. In November 2024 it acquired iQone Healthcare Switzerland for about 30 billion won. In 2025 it bought an Eli Lilly production plant in Branchburg, New Jersey, which began operating in January 2026. In May 2026 it bought the French pharmacy-products firm Gifrer. On November 16, 2025, at a public-private meeting at the presidential office in Yongsan, convened in the aftermath of Korea-U.S. tariff negotiations, Seo pledged 4 trillion won in domestic facility investment over three years, a doubling of the company's startup fund to 1 trillion won, and annual R&D spending of more than 1 trillion won, on par with the global pharmaceutical majors. He also co-chairs the country's National Growth Fund. The blood-testing startup with Amazon has not materialized. The idea survives as a line in his telemedicine plans, which he now wants to build on an AI-driven platform with investment in the United States.
In October 2024, he went back to Konkuk University, where he had once paid tuition with taxi fares, and pledged 1 billion won toward a One-Health research cluster for the university's centennial. In a lecture afterward, a student asked what his mindset had been when he started Celltrion. "I was focused on going where others didn't, going all the way, and running together with the people around me," he said. "Don't be afraid to fail." He also told them to do what they loved, which is not, on the record, what he did. He did what was available.
On March 24, 2026, Celltrion held its 35th annual general meeting of shareholders at Songdo Convensia, a convention center on reclaimed land in Incheon, a few kilometers from the factories he had built to American standards before he had any American customers. War had broken out between the United States and Iran, oil markets were in turmoil, and the shareholders were nervous. For the first time since 2015, eleven years earlier, Seo Jung-jin chaired the meeting himself.
He was sixty-eight. He told the room that Celltrion was export-oriented and unaffected by oil prices, and that sales would grow that year as well. He said he did not believe the stock was overvalued relative to performance. He described a fourth-generation obesity drug that would enter Phase 1 trials the following year. He laid out a 1.2265-trillion-won expansion of Plants 4 and 5 at the Songdo campus, bringing capacity there to 180,000 liters, and an expansion of the Branchburg plant to 141,000 liters. "That would make us third in facilities," he said, "after Samsung Biologics and Lonza."
His son is the chief executive. His shares sit in a holding company he owns almost entirely. His daughters are registered in his family register and absent from his succession. The chair at the front of the room at Songdo Convensia is, by his own definition, a title, not a throne, and in March 2026 he went back and sat in it himself.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract the operating logic from a career that has been both instructive and cautionary, often in the same decision. Seo Jung-jin is not a clean model. Several of the principles below are lessons in what to do; a few are lessons in what his choices cost. The common thread is that he is a process engineer who wandered into biology, and his advantages came less from scientific insight than from seeing structural openings in an industry whose incumbents were too invested to see them.
The principles
- 1.Attack the market your competitors are hostage to.
- 2.Build to the standard before you have the product.
- 3.Rent distribution, then repossess it.
- 4.Improve the copy until it becomes an original.
- 5.Make price a weapon, and occasionally a gift.
- 6.In a crisis, speed is the product.
- 7.Know exactly what you have pledged.
- 8.Every structural shortcut accrues suspicion interest.
- 9.Treat founder charisma as a depleting asset.
- 10.Set targets as directions, and expect to be held to them as forecasts.
- 11.The first generation's job is to plant trees it won't harvest.
Principle 1
Attack the market your competitors are hostage to
The biosimilar market was obvious in retrospect and unattractive to almost everyone with the capability to enter it. The multinationals who could have made biosimilars most easily were also the ones whose portfolios were most exposed to biosimilar retaliation. Johnson & Johnson could not credibly lead an assault on biologic pricing while selling Remicade. Celltrion's own letter states it plainly: it created a market "that even the world's multinational pharmaceutical giants could not dream of starting."
The insight is not that incumbents are lazy. Incumbents are rational inside their own incentive structures, and some opportunities lie entirely outside those structures. A company with nothing to lose can attack categories that a company with everything to lose cannot touch. Seo's version of this was to choose an industry where his lack of a legacy portfolio was itself the advantage.
He described it to Konkuk students in 2024 as "going where others didn't." That undersells the analysis. The point was not novelty for its own sake. He went where others couldn't go, because going there would have meant attacking themselves.
Tactic: List the three moves your largest competitor could make tomorrow but won't, because they would cannibalize its existing revenue, and build your company inside that list.
Principle 2
Build to the standard before you have the product
Celltrion's Incheon plants were built to FDA cGMP and EMA GMP standards at a time when the company had failed vaccine trials and no approved products. The overbuild looks reckless until December 2007, when the FDA cleared Celltrion to manufacture Bristol-Myers Squibb's Orencia. The factory became a credential before it became a profit center. It proved to regulators, partners, and eventually the European approval committee that a startup in Incheon could produce a monoclonal antibody to the world's most demanding specifications.
The logic applies in any regulated industry. Compliance infrastructure is slow to build and cannot be faked. If you build it early, it turns into contract revenue while your own pipeline matures, and that revenue carries an implicit endorsement from the customer who trusted you with their molecule. Seventeen years later, Celltrion was signing a contract manufacturing deal with Teva for Ajovy and buying Eli Lilly's plant in New Jersey. The contract manufacturer had become a manufacturer of last resort for the industry.
Tactic: Identify the single most demanding certification in your industry and build to it before your product requires it, then sell that capability to incumbents while your own product catches up.
Principle 3
Rent distribution, then repossess it
Celltrion did not build a global salesforce in its first decade. It licensed distribution to Hospira across the Americas, Oceania, and Europe in 2009; Nippon Kayaku and Egis in 2010; Mundipharma, Biogaran, and Kern in 2013; and Pfizer for the U.S. Remicade biosimilar. Each partner brought existing hospital relationships, regulatory familiarity, and payer access that would have taken Celltrion a decade to replicate in each market.
The second half of the move is to take the channel back. By January 2019, Seo was telling reporters at the Conrad Hotel in Yeouido that Celltrion would secure direct sales networks worldwide to sharpen price competitiveness. Distributors take a margin, and in a business whose entire proposition is price, that margin is the thing to recapture. The 2023 merger of Celltrion and Celltrion Healthcare completed the process: maker and seller became a single entity.
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From Licensee to Owner
How Celltrion's route to market evolved over two decades.
2008
Nexol and Celltrion sign a global distribution agreement.
2009
Hospira takes the Americas, Oceania, and Europe; Nexol renamed Celltrion Healthcare.
2010
Nippon Kayaku (Japan) and Egis (CIS, Eastern Europe, Middle East) added.
2013
Mundipharma, Biogaran, and Kern added in Europe.
2019
Seo announces push for direct sales networks worldwide, including a China joint venture.
2023
Celltrion and Celltrion Healthcare merge; maker and seller become one company.
2024
Zymfentra signs supply deals with U.S. pharmacy benefit managers including Express Scripts.
Tactic: License distribution in markets where you lack relationships, but write every contract with an eventual exit in mind, because the margin you rent out is the margin you will eventually need back.
Principle 4
Improve the copy until it becomes an original
The most consequential decision of Celltrion's second decade dates to 2006: a program to reformulate infliximab, sold only as an intravenous infusion, into a subcutaneous injection patients could administer at home. It took roughly a decade of work and more to reach U.S. approval. When the FDA cleared it in October 2023, it did so as a new drug, Zymfentra, rather than as a biosimilar, and that let Celltrion price and market it as a differentiated product.
Copying is a viable strategy, but it is a ceiling. A pure copier competes on price forever, and eventually others copy it. The escape is to use the deep process knowledge that copying requires as a platform for incremental innovation, on dosing, formulation, delivery, or patient convenience, until the copy is legally and commercially something new. Remsima became the first single product in Korean pharmaceutical history to exceed 1 trillion won in annual sales, and the subcutaneous version is a large part of why.
Tactic: Once you've matched an incumbent's product, find the single most annoying thing patients or customers endure in using it, and make removing that friction your first original R&D bet.
Principle 5
Make price a weapon, and occasionally a gift
The founding letter frames the mission as "affordable drugs," and Seo's public rhetoric has stayed consistent: at J.P. Morgan in 2024 he argued that most people die not for lack of cures but because cures are too expensive. Regkirona was priced at around 85 percent of competing treatments for export, and supplied domestically at production cost. "The biggest reason we are supplying COVID-19 medicine at production cost is to protect our nation's health," he told shareholders in March 2021.
Reading the production-cost pledge as pure charity misses its strategic function. It bought national goodwill at the exact moment Celltrion was transitioning from a stock-market story to a national champion, and it was cheap relative to the reputational return. The general lesson is that price can carry a message as well as a margin. A company whose whole identity is affordability earns credibility by occasionally pricing at zero margin in a crisis.
Tactic: Pick one moment of genuine public need in your market and price at or near cost, deliberately and publicly, as an investment in the trust your normal pricing depends on.
Principle 6
In a crisis, speed is the product
Celltrion had no vaccine capability and had nearly died from its one attempt to develop one. When COVID-19 arrived, Seo did not pursue a vaccine. He went straight to what the company already knew how to do, discovering and manufacturing monoclonal antibodies at scale, and applied it to blood from recovered patients. "What's crucial for the development of a COVID-19 treatment is how quickly it can be developed," he said, "regardless of when the pandemic ends."
Notice the restraint in this. The pandemic offered a dozen glamorous directions. He chose the one that required the least new capability, which is why Celltrion could screen 300 candidates and move toward human trials within months. The result was conditional approval in February 2021, a nearly doubled share price in 2020, and his ascent to the top of Korea's rich list.
Tactic: When a crisis creates sudden demand, resist pursuing the most important problem and pursue instead the most important problem you can solve with capabilities you already have.
Principle 7
Know exactly what you have pledged
This is the cautionary principle, and it runs through the whole story. In 2004, Seo pledged his organs to loan sharks. By 2013, Celltrion's affiliates had taken out loans backed by Celltrion equity, and those loans required repayment or more collateral if the stock fell. Regulators alleged that this exposure was the motive behind his alleged manipulation. Bloomberg's 2020 net-worth calculation for Seo specifically excluded shares he had pledged as collateral.
When the collateral is your own stock, the share price stops being a measure of the business and becomes a condition of survival. That changes behavior in ways founders often fail to anticipate: hostility toward short sellers, dramatic announcements, a temptation to manage the price rather than the company. The 2013 vow to sell everything to a multinational, followed by a halving of the stock and a regulatory investigation, is what that pressure looks like in practice.
Tactic: Before pledging equity as collateral, write down the share price at which you'd face a margin call, and ask honestly whether you'll make good decisions as the stock approaches that number.
Principle 8
Every structural shortcut accrues suspicion interest
The split between Celltrion (maker) and Celltrion Healthcare (seller) made sense in 1999, when Nexol existed before Celltrion did. It also meant that nearly all of Celltrion's reported revenue came from sales to an affiliate. Ghost Raven Research's 2016 report turned this into an accusation that 90 percent of revenue was fictional. The accusation did not survive the next decade of actual sales, but the structure kept generating suspicion until the 2023 merger finally eliminated it.
Founders often adopt structures for good local reasons, such as tax, financing, or control, without pricing in the long-term cost in credibility. That cost compounds. Each time investors encounter the structure, they discount the company a little for the possibility that it hides something, and in Celltrion's case the discount was worth more than the structure ever saved.
Tactic: For any related-party arrangement in your company, estimate what an aggressive short seller would say about it, and if the answer is damaging, unwind the structure before someone publishes the report.
Principle 9
Treat founder charisma as a depleting asset
When Seo returned in March 2023, Celltrion's stock rose from about 140,000 to 180,000 won in a month. By October 25, his in-person press conference to defend the merger moved the stock by less than a percent and failed to lift it above the buyback threshold. The Korean press noticed that "Seo Jung-jin Magic" seemed to have lost its effect.
A founder's personal credibility is a real asset. It can move markets, close deals, and rally employees. But every withdrawal depletes it, and a founder who has retired and returned, announced and retracted, and made targets the market has watched slip carries less credibility each time. The motivational videos still circulate by the thousand. The shares respond less.
§
The Pledge Ledger
Seo's major public commitments and what became of them.
| Pledge | Year | Outcome | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sell entire controlling stake to a multinational | 2013 | Sale never occurred; Seo retained control | Reversed |
| Step down; avoid making the company a "kingdom" | 2019 | Retired 2021, returned 2023 | Revised |
| Management led by professionals, not family | 2021 | Elder son became CEO and board chair at end of 2023 | Reversed |
| COVID-19 treatment, supplied domestically at cost | 2020 | Regkirona conditionally approved Feb. 5, 2021 | Delivered |
| Blood-test startup with Amazon | 2020 | Not launched; folded into telemedicine plans | Deferred |
| ₩100 trillion fund via Nasdaq listing of holdings | 2024 | Dropped | Abandoned |
| ₩5 trillion revenue in 2025 | 2024 | ₩4.16 trillion, a company record | Partial |
| Subcutaneous infliximab (program begun 2006) | 2006 | Zymfentra approved by FDA, 2023; Remsima tops ₩1 trillion | Delivered |
Tactic: Keep a private ledger of every public commitment you make as a founder, and before making the next one, check how many of the last five you've kept.
Principle 10
Set targets as directions, and expect to be held to them as forecasts
The ledger above reveals something the market has largely absorbed: Seo's targets function as orientation rather than prediction. A 100-trillion-won fund, 10 trillion won in revenue by 2027, a blood-testing service for seven billion people. None of these is a forecast in the sense a CFO would recognize. They are statements of scale meant to recruit capital, talent, and attention toward a direction, and the company has generally moved substantially in that direction even when it fell short of the number.
The risk is that the audience does not always know which kind of statement it is hearing. Shareholders who bought on the 5-trillion-won promise were holding a company that had posted record results and missed the target by nearly a fifth. Founders who use ambitious targets as recruiting tools should be explicit about it, or accept that the market will eventually price their words at a discount.
Tactic: When you announce an ambitious target, say aloud whether it is a plan or an aspiration, and keep the two in separate sentences.
Principle 11
The first generation's job is to plant trees it won't harvest
Seo's diagnosis of Korean economic stagnation is generational: the heirs "inherited orchards from the first generation, but missed the timing to plant new trees." His own late-career behavior follows the diagnosis. Instead of harvesting the biosimilar franchise, he has been pushing Celltrion into antibody-drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies, a fourth-generation obesity treatment, contract manufacturing, and a trillion-won-plus plant expansion through 2030. Nearly all of these will pay off, if they pay off, under his son's leadership.
The difficulty, which Seo has not resolved, is that planting trees for the next generation slides easily into choosing the next generation. The orchard metaphor implies an heir, and his heirs are his sons. Separating ownership from management was, by his own admission, "not the ultimate answer," only an approximation he hoped to reach. The approximation has drifted toward the dynastic model he set out to avoid. The new trees are real. So is the drift.
Tactic: Allocate a fixed share of today's profits to projects whose payoff falls outside your own expected tenure, and decide who will judge those projects before you decide who will run them.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Seo Jung-jin, Celltrion shareholders' meeting, March 2021Social order cannot be maintained with only a small percentage of wealthy and mostly lower class citizens.
— Seo Jung-jin, interview with Maeil Business NewspaperThe second and third-generation entrepreneurs inherited orchards from the first generation, but missed the timing to plant new trees.
— Seo Jung-jin, lecture at Konkuk University, October 2024I was focused on going where others didn't, going all the way, and running together with the people around me.
— Seo Jung-jin, on being named EY World Entrepreneur of the Year, June 2021Entrepreneurship to me has always been about bringing together a group of people toward a common vision, embracing challenges as opportunities and committing oneself to contribute to the greater good.
— Seo Jung-jin, Celltrion shareholders' meeting, March 2021Dividing ownership and management may not be the ultimate answer but my goal is to realize a model close to it as possible.
Maxims
- Attack the hostage market. The best openings are the ones incumbents cannot pursue without attacking themselves.
- Credentials before products. Build to the highest regulatory standard early, and rent that capability out while your own pipeline matures.
- Rent the channel, then take it back. Distribution partners are a bridge into new markets, and the margin you give them is the margin you will eventually need to recapture.
- Copy, then improve. Matching the incumbent earns you entry, and improving on the incumbent's product is what lets you set your own price.
- Price carries a message. Pricing at cost in a public crisis can buy more trust than any campaign.
- Use what you already know. In an emergency, the fastest path runs through existing capabilities, not the most glamorous problem.
- Count your collateral. Whatever you pledge, whether your body, your shares, or your word, will shape your decisions as the bill comes due.
- Unwind suspicious structures. Related-party arrangements save money once and keep costing credibility until they are dismantled.
- Charisma depletes. Every comeback, retraction, and missed target draws down the founder's account with the market.
- Plant what you won't harvest. The founder's last job is to start projects whose results will belong to someone else, and to be honest about who that someone is.
