The company followed the same invest-for-scale model in each of its major businesses, displacing Sony in TVs and Nokia in mobile phones. Along the way it developed a reputation for brute-force tactics against competitors and a win-at-all-costs ethos among its overworked employees. Today Samsung Electronics is a behemoth with 307,000 workers. It’s so big, in fact, that it builds whole mini-metropolises to accommodate the growth. Its Samsung Digital City in Suwon, outside Seoul, has the look and feel of a Silicon Valley corporate campus, with 500 different bus routes ferrying its 34,000 employees to and from Seoul and other parts of South Korea.