I’m not an expert on Korea.  In fact, I think of Korea in much the way I think of India or Indonesia–or Japan or Italy, for that matter.  They’re all places where very powerful family controlled industrial groups have enormous economic and political power.  As a result, the rules of the stock market game are very different from those that prevail, say, in the United States.  Piecing them together can take an enormous amount of time and effort.  I’ve believe that, except in the case of Japan in the 1980s, the reward for mastering these markets would never be large enough to justify the effort involved.

In the case of Korea, government policy, both formally and informally, is heavily tilted in favor of a set of family controlled industrial conglomerates called chaebols (much like the zaibatsu/keiretsu of Japan).  In my view, these are not American-style corporations.  They care little for profit growth/maximization or for the welfare of ordinary shareholders–Korean or foreign.  I’ve found the laws and regulations that govern them to be bewilderingly complex and their financial statements (admittedly I haven’t read one carefully in well over a decade) unreliable.

Recently, Samsung, a major chaebol, decided that one affiliate, Cheil, would buy another, Samsung C&T, at what appears to be a bargain basement price. US activist investor, Elliott Associates, then bought a bunch of Samsung C&T stock and challenged the takeover.  Its objective was presumably either to have its stake bought out at a higher price by some other Samsung company or to compel Cheil to raise the acquisition price for everyone.

My initial reaction on reading this was that Elliott was fooled by superficial similarities with the US and didn’t understand the deeper political and cultural barriers it would face in Korea.  That has, so far, proved to be the case.  Shareholders have voted in favor of the acquisition as originally proposed.  Elliott is apparently continuing to sue to try to prevent/reverse this outcome.

The situation is a little more interesting than I’d thought, though, and bears watching:

–the Elliott effort to have Samsung C&T shareholders reject the takeover failed by only 3% of the shares voted.  This is a surprisingly small amount, in my opinion.  On the other hand,

–the deciding vote in favor was cast by the government-connected National Pension Fund, which ironically has previously been a critic of chaebol behavior.

My guess is that it’s ultimately Elliott’s foreignness that swayed the voting, particularly at the NPS.  Were a Korean equivalent to attempt the same thing, the outcome might have been different.  If so, there may be hope for investors in Korea after all.  I’ll continue to be on the sidelines until there’s more tangible evidence of change, however.