Chairman
CHEY Tae-won
Chairman, Chey Institute for Advanced Studies
Chairman, SK Group
CHEY Tae-won has served as Chairman of the SK Group since 1998. Under his leadership, SK has continued to broaden its horizons globally across multiple industries including energy, chemical, telecommunications, semiconductors, and others.
With a combined revenue of 139 trillion won, SK Group was ranked 73th among the Fortune Global 500 in 2019. Chairman Chey’s management philosophy stresses the importance of creating social as well as economic values, and maximizing the happiness of shareholders, customers, business partners, and employees alike. Based on this philosophy, SK Group announced in 2018 its management principle called Double Bottom Line (DBL), which outlines SK’s vision to create economic and social values and share these values with the rest of the Korean society.
In 2014, Chairman Chey published his book, New Attempt: Social Enterprise, in which he underscored the importance of creating ecosystems for social enterprises. In that same year, he started the Social Progress Credit (SPC) Project, which aimed to provide incentives to enterprises that create social value. The 6 years of progress made as a result of SPC was recognized as a business case at Harvard Business School in 2020. In 2019, he co-authored a business case study with professors of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, titled “SK’s Double Bottom Line: Challenges and Way Forward.”
In 2018, Chairman Chey founded the Chey Institute for Advanced Studies to honor his late father and former Chairman of the SK Group CHEY Jong-hyon, who was a life-long advocate of cultivating human talent. Since its establishment, the Chey Institute has created a new knowledge platform that enables cooperation with world-renowned universities, institutes and think tanks, and contributed to the spread of knowledge and global strategy that generate social value.
Chairman Chey holds his B.A. in physics from Korea University and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He previously served as a Working Group Convener at the G20 Business Summit, Director of the Board of the UN Global Compact, Advisory Board Member of the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy, and member of the Brookings Institution’s International Advisory Council. He also served as the CEO Professor of Techno-Economics & Policy Program at Seoul National University.