One Korean friend told me that even talking to someone who is just one year older than you. You have to use Korean honorifics.
If he or she consider you be friend, one day they will inform you that we are friend now that you don't need to use honorifics any more.
I was so shock.
I believe that is Korean language and culture generally, not specific to Samsung. Japanese has a similar thing, the grammar conjugates verbs according to social respect/age levels. It used to be much stricter in Japan, I know less about Korean. And it is not unique there, when I was young I made the mistake of "tutoi-ing" my colleagues in Paris and got taken aside to explain I must use "vous" even though they were using "tu".
In Japan it used to be applicable to bowing, too. Business card exchange was followed by an interval of careful study so each person could figure out who should bow deeper.
The history has to do with Confucian values learned from China a thousand years ago, copied into the aristocracy as a strict code (compare to France "Sun King" Louis 14 expecting courtiers to dance and inventing a whole etiquette around use of table utensils), and gradually diffused to the commoners over following centuries as expected norms of speech.
Everyone has expected norms of politeness that seem strange to other cultures. In China, the need for westerners to say "thank you" at every opportunity is seen as odd.
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