Chung Yoo-kyung, Chung Gyo-sun, Heo Seo-hong, Shin Yu-yeol ‘7080 Owners’ Forward Deployment…Overcoming Crisis with ‘Young Blood’

[Korea Financial Times, Park seulgi] The most notable aspect of the 2025 regular executive appointments is the large-scale promotion of owners. In particular, relatively young owners, such as those born in the 70s and 80s, have made great strides. This is an attempt to overcome the crisis through generational change in the owner family in an uncertain business environment that changes every moment. Representative examples include Shinsegae Group Chairman Chung Yoo-kyung, Hyundai Home Shopping Chairman Chung Gyo-sun, Lotte Holdings Vice President Shin Yoo-yeol, and GS Retail CEO and Vice President Heo Seo-hong.

The news of Shinsegae Group Chairman Chung Yoo-kyung’s promotion signaled a generational change in the owner family. Shinsegae Group, which carried out an early personnel change on October 30, promoted CEO Chung Yoo-kyung to chairman after 9 years. Born in 1972, Chung Yoo-kyung is the first female chairman among major conglomerate businessmen born after 1970. In particular, she surprised everyone by taking the position of chairman without going through the vice chairman position.

Chairman Chung Yoo-kyung is known as a ‘hermit manager’ and has not had any significant external activities. However, he is evaluated to have taken the lead in securing competitiveness in the department store’s main business through the ‘landmark strategy’ of being the number one store in the region. Last year, Shinsegae Department Store’s sales and profits in the department store sector doubled compared to 2016, and it recorded the highest sales ever in the first half of this year.
Chairman Chung has always emphasized the need to “clearly set business performance targets and rally the organization's capabilities.” The main idea is to order employees to ponder and analyze deeply, set clear goals, and execute them quickly. With the recent slump in the retail industry, Chung's management philosophy is expected to be an important crisis management measure.

On Oct. 31, Hyundai Home Shopping's Vice Chairman and CEO Chung Gyo-sun, born in 1974, was promoted to chairman after 14 years. Chung's promotion is not unrelated to the sluggish industry. In its announcement, Hyundai Department Store Group said, “Hyundai Home Shopping's growth continues to slow down under the deteriorating domestic home shopping market environment,” and emphasized that “strong leadership from Vice Chairman Chung Gyo-sun, who has served as CEO of Hyundai Home Shopping for 16 years, is necessary.”

Hyundai Home Shopping was once the group's cash cow, but it has struggled with declining TV viewers, e-commerce aggression and high transmission fees. Last year, Hyundai Home Shopping posted sales of KRW 2.0645 trillion, down 1.7% from the previous year. Operating profit for the same period fell 45.3% to KRW 60 billion.

As Hyundai Home Shopping struggles, Chairman Chung's responsible management is expected to become more important. With his promotion, Chairman Chung introduced the 'Division' system in the Machinery Business Unit, the Division in charge, and the Management Support Center. The strategy is to increase product specialization by dividing into three divisions: MD Strategy Division, Channel Strategy Division, and Management Support Division.

GS Group's fourth-generation owner, Vice President Heo Seo-hong, was promoted to CEO of GS Retail in the 2025 regular executive personnel reshuffle held on the 27th of last month. Having joined GS Retail in the 2024 regular executive personnel reshuffle, he was promoted to CEO in just one year. A natural 'generational change' occurred as Vice President Heo Yeon-soo, who had led the company for nine years, left.
Heo was born in 1977 and is regarded as an expert in identifying future growth engines and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It is believed that he is the right person to lead GS Retail's future growth in the rapidly changing retail environment.

In his role as Group Holding Company CEO in 2020, Mr. Heo established GS Group's new business investment power, built the investment portfolio and promoted large-scale M&A. The acquisition of Hugel is a representative example of his achievements. Hugel was recognized for expanding GS Group's reach into the bio sector. GS Retail said the appointment “reflects the company's commitment to sustainable growth by discovering new growth engines.”

Shin Yoo-yeol, the third-generation Lotte Group executive and eldest son of Chairman Shin Dong-bin, was born in 1986, and was promoted to executive vice president in a regular executive reshuffle on the 28th of last month. It was a fast-track promotion, just a year after he was appointed executive vice president, and industry interpretations are that it was meant to boost Lotte's bio industry, which the company has identified as the future of food, amid difficulties inside and outside the group. The responsibility given to Vice President Shin Yoo-yeol is therefore enormous. As Lotte Chemical, the main cash cow of Lotte Group, faces a liquidity crisis, attention is focused on Vice President Shin's crisis management skills.

Vice President Shin Yoo-yeol has been gradually expanding his position within the group since last year. In the regular executive reshuffle in 2024, he was promoted to executive director and concurrently served as the head of the future growth office at Lotte Holdings and the head of the global strategy office at Lotte BioLogics. In March of this year, he was appointed as an inside director at Lotte BioLogics. This is the first time that Vice President Shin has become a registered executive at a Lotte Group affiliate in Korea. In June, Vice President Shin was listed as an inside director at the regular shareholders’ meeting of Lotte Holdings Japan held in Tokyo, Japan. With this appointment, Vice President Shin expanded his influence by taking on executive positions at both the Korean and Japanese holding companies.

Park seulgi (seulgi@fntimes.com)