SEOUL, South Korea — Shin Kyuk-ho, who built a chewing-gum business into ​the ​hugely successful Lotte ​Group in South Korea and Japan, only to see his sons squabble over the corporate empire, died on Sunday in Seoul. He was 98.

The company, South Korea’s fifth-largest business conglomerate, announced the death.

Mr. Shin was the last of the rags-to-riches founders of South Korea’s major family-run conglomerates, or chaebol, and his death represented the end of an era for many South Koreans. Charismatic chaebol tycoons like Mr. Shin were credited with engineering the dramatic industrialization that transformed the country into one of Asia’s leading economies after the destruction of the Korean War in the 1950s.

Like other chaebol founders, Mr. Shin’s beginnings were humble.

He was born in a rural village in Ulsan, in the southeast of what is now South Korea, in 1921, when the country was still languishing under Japan’s colonial rule. He was the eldest son in a family with 10 children.

The young Mr. Shin had a literary bent, and yearned to become a novelist. He was raising pigs in his village after graduating from an agricultural high school when he decided to stow away in a ship to Japan in 1941 to pursue a literary career there.