Bill Gates, billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder, is heading to Seoul this week to deepen partnerships with South Korea’s corporate heavyweights, including Samsung, in a bid to expand innovation-driven social impact in public health, sanitation and equal opportunities.
The trip, beginning Thursday, marks Gates’ first visit to Korea in three years.
He is expected to hold meetings with top conglomerate chiefs — among them Samsung Electronics Co. Chairman Lee Jae-yong, known internationally as Jay Y. Lee, and SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won — to discuss philanthropic projects backed by the Gates Foundation, chaired by Gates.
LONG TIES WITH SAMSUNG LEE
At the center of Gates’ visit is Samsung’s Lee, with whom he has maintained close ties for years.
Their relationship has been instrumental in advancing a Gates Foundation initiative to reinvent low-cost, water-efficient toilets for developing countries.
Toilets featured in the exhibition, A Better Way to Go: Toilets and the Future of Sanitation, at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center in Seattle, Washington (Courtesy of Gates Foundation) In 2018, Gates urgently reached out to Lee for Samsung’s help in developing new toilet technologies under the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge initiative launched by the Gates Foundation in 2011 after engineers working on the project hit a technological snag.
Samsung Electronics’ research arm, the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, went on to develop heat treatment and bioprocessing technologies that safely process human waste, recycle water and neutralize pathogens.
Its system enables the treated water to be fully recycled, according to Samsung.
Samsung has agreed to make patents related to the project available royalty-free to developing countries once commercialization begins.
The Gates Foundation plans to roll out the Samsung-powered “green toilets” soon.
VACCINES AND BEYOND
Gates is also expected to explore new philanthropic projects with Lee during his stay, as well as meet SK’s Chey and other Korean conglomerate leaders involved in global vaccine development.
SK is one of the Korean business groups, alongside LG Group, participating in vaccine development led by the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) set up at Seoul National University in 2000 with significant funding from the Gates Foundation.
Team members explain their work to Bill Gates at the Institut Pasteur de Dakar lab in Senegal (Courtesy of Gates Foundation) SK Bioscience Co. and LG Chem Ltd. are key players in developing vaccines for diseases that disproportionately affect low- and middle-income countries.
“Gates has often said that Korea’s conglomerates, which helped engineer the Miracle on the Han River, should now share their expertise and resources with the world,” said a Seoul-based industry official. “This visit could pave the way for new partnership models.”
The Seattle-based Gates Foundation is one of the world’s wealthiest charitable organizations, with a $77.2 billion endowment as of the end of 2024.
Since its founding in 2000, the foundation has committed more than $102 billion to causes ranging from global health to education.
After stepping down as Microsoft chairman in 2008, Gates has focused on philanthropy targeting poverty alleviation, global health and education.
During his visit he is also expected to meet with Korean President Lee Jae Myung, according to a Yonhap News report.
Write to Jeong-Soo Hwang at hjs@hankyung.com Sookyung Seo edited this article.
