Lotte Group is a corporate group started by Zainichi Korean businessman Shin Kyuk-ho in South Korea on June 15, 1948, starting with the South Korean Lotte Co., composed of Lotte Holdings (Japan) and Lotte Corporation (South Korea).[1][2] Shin expanded Lotte to his ancestral country, South Korea, with the establishment of Lotte Confectionery in Seoul on April 3, 1967.
Name
The source of the company's name is neither Korean nor Japanese, or even Chinese, but German. Shin Kyuk-ho was impressed with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and named his newly founded company Lotte after the character Charlotte in the novel.[3][4]