Koo Bon-moo
South Korean business executive
Koo Bon-moo (Korean: 구본무; 10 February 1945 – 20 May 2018) was a South Korean business executive, who gained worldwide fame as the renamer and business executive of the LG Group.
Early life
Born on 10 February 1945 in Jinju, Korea, Empire of Japan (now South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea), Koo enrolled at Yonsei University. He moved to Ohio and completed his bachelor's and master's degrees at Ashland University and Cleveland State University, respectively.
Business career
Upon graduation from Cleveland State University, Koo returned to South Korea in 1975 and began working for Lucky Chemical, which later became LG Chem. He was transferred to GoldStar in 1980, and from 1983 to 1985, headed the company's Tokyo office. In 1995, Koo succeeded his father Koo Cha-kyung, the oldest son of LG's founder Koo In-hwoi as chairman of LG Group because of the Koo family's “male-only succession rule". Koo Bon-moo adopted his nephew Koo Kwang-mo in 2004, after losing his only son in 1994. Starting in 2017, Koo Bon-moo sought continual treatment for a brain tumor. He eventually ended medical treatment, and died in Seoul at a hospital on 20 May 2018, aged 73.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1276156. VIAF identifies the subject as 286543154. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 2018, 1975 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Koo Bon-moo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.