Lee Set to Gain ₩2.6T Samsung Shares

Hong Ra-hee signed the gift agreement on Monday, October 12, 2026. The honorary director of the Leeum Museum of Art committed Samsung Electronics common shares to her son, Chairman Lee Jae-yong, known also as Jay Y. Lee. A transfer date was fixed between them. the agreement recorded only the private rearrangement of her holding to his.

The same day held a second transaction. Lee bought Samsung Electronics common shares from Hong in a separate off-market sale. Reports differed on the exact block: 7.6671 million shares in some accounts, about 7.67 million in another, and 7,188,793 in a third. The unit price did not. Each share cost ₩250,500, roughly $190. Multiplied out, the purchase totaled approximately ₩1.9206 trillion, near $1.4 billion or about $1.37 billion under a different conversion. Hong received the cash. The buy secured her liquidity against inheritance-tax loans after Lee Kun-hee’s death; one outlet read the deal as a move to obtain funds for tax payments. The shares left her holding and entered his, still inside the family.

Both transactions surfaced together the next day. The filing entered the Financial Supervisory Service’s DART system on Tuesday, October 13, 2026. DART is the electronic disclosure system that publishes transaction plans by executives and major shareholders. It showed Hong transferring 11.158 million common shares of Samsung Electronics to Lee. Other reports put the same block at 11.16 million or 11,158,000 shares. Either way the holding came to about 0.17 percent of the company. Samsung Electronics shares closed that Tuesday at ₩233,500, about $170 each. The gift was worth approximately ₩2.6 trillion. Outlets converted the sum to between $1.86 billion and $1.95 billion.

Before the transfer Lee held 105,219,053 shares, equal to a 1.58 percent stake. Once the gifted shares arrived his holding would stand at 116,377,053 shares, or 1.75 percent. Hong’s stake would decline from 0.99 percent to 0.82 percent. Taken with the off-market purchase, about 18.83 million Samsung Electronics shares were passing from mother to son. The founding family’s combined ownership of the company did not change.

Lee Kun-hee, the former Samsung chairman and Lee Jae-yong’s father, died in 2020. The family then faced an inheritance-tax liability of roughly ₩12 trillion. That bill was paid in six installments, the last of them finished in April 2026. Over the years that followed, family members shifted shares among themselves to cover the tax obligations without loosening their hold on the company. Last month Hong sold a 0.11 percent Samsung Electronics stake to Lee, a block worth about ₩1.9 trillion, as part of a financial plan to repay loans taken out to pay the inheritance taxes. In January she had given him her entire holding in Samsung C&T—1,808,577 common shares worth about ₩407 billion. Industry observers saw the latest gift, set against those earlier moves, as succession and group-control consolidation entering a final stage. Market impact was viewed as limited because the shares stayed inside the family.

Mother and son had already appeared together at public events long before any October paperwork. Photographs from November 28, 2025, show Lee Jae-yong and Hong Ra-hee at the Naval Academy in Changwon after the commissioning of Lee’s son, Lee Ji-ho. The young man had just become a Navy officer with the 139th class of Navy and Marine Corps officer candidates. The graduation and commissioning ceremony took place that afternoon on the academy grounds in Jinhae District. In one frame Lee Ji-ho stands at the center, his father on one side and his grandmother on the other. In October 2024 the same pair attended a pediatric cancer and rare-disease support program at Seoul National University Hospital’s children’s hospital in Jongno-gu. The two appearances fixed mother and son together in public while Lee served as chairman of Samsung Electronics and held the chairmanship of Samsung he had taken in October 2022.

November 12, 2026, is the date set for the transfer. On that day the Samsung Electronics common shares pass from Hong Ra-hee to Lee Jae-yong. Gift tax on the block is calculated from the average closing price across the two months before November 12 and the two months after it; the final amount is finalized early the following year. Simple estimates drawn from the October 13 close land near ₩1.56 trillion, about $1.2 billion. Other accounts put the same liability at approximately ₩1.55 trillion, or at a figure exceeding ₩1.5 trillion.