SEOUL -- Unlike other offsprings of South Korea's family-run conglomerates, the 27-year-old second daughter of SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won chose to pursue her out-of-the-ordinary career by joining a Chinese investment company after she completed her duty as a naval officer.
Usually, the sons and daughters of family-run conglomerate owners study abroad and get promoted rapidly, eventually becoming group executives at an early age, but Chey Min-jung has taken a different path, grabbing attention when she was commissioned as a naval officer in 2014.
She served for six months aboard a destroyer in anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia in 2015. She was discharged in November last year after being assigned to a fleet responsible for guarding an inter-Korean maritime border.
According to industry officials, Min-jung joined Hony Capital, a Chinese private equity firm, in July this year. Hony Capital is owned by Legend Holdings, the controlling shareholder of Chinese multinational technology company Lenovo. She once co-founded an online shopping mall selling South Korean products to Chinese consumers after she graduated from Beijing University in 2014.
Chey Yoon-jung, the eldest daughter, started working as a manager at SK Biopharmaceutical, a drug research company, in 2017. The 29-year-old graduated from the International School of Beijing, studied biology at the University of Chicago and finished an internship program at Harvard's physics and chemistry lab.
Chey In-keun, the chairman's 23-year-old only son, is studying at Brown University in the United States.