Employees at Samsung Electronics’s memory chip division are to receive bonuses averaging about £310,000 each through a landmark profit-sharing agreement, as the AI boom drives up chipmakers’ profits.
Fears of a strike at Samsung were averted on Wednesday after two unions for the world’s largest memory chipmaker said that 74% of the 62,616 workers who cast their votes had backed the deal.
The agreement, mediated by South Korea’s government, means Samsung will set aside 10.5% of operating profits at its semiconductor division to pay special bonuses to its chip workers. It should end a bitter five-month dispute.
But it could also create tensions within Samsung, as employees in other divisions such as its consumer electronics arm will receive much smaller bonuses in comparison.
Reuters reported last week that a memory chip worker with a base salary of 80 million won ($53,400 or £39,700), for example, is expected to receive a bonus of about 626 million won ($416,000 or £310,000) this year, mostly paid in stock, according to a union source.
Bonus levels will vary between staff. Bloomberg calculated that Samsung’s chip workers stand to get 513 million won ($340,000 or £250,000) on average. Samsung employs about 78,000 people in its semiconductor division, which includes memory chips, contract chipmaking and designing semiconductors for clients.
Demand for memory chips from AI datacentres has led to a chip shortage, prompting vendors to lift their prices sharply, boosting their profits.
This boom has driven the value of the memory chip firms SK Hynix and Micron over the one-trillion-dollar mark for the first time.
Shares in South Korea’s SK Hynix surged by more than 9% on Wednesday, lifting its market capitalisation to above $1tn. On Tuesday, Micron’s share price rocketed by 19%, taking its value over the $1trn mark, after analysts at investment bank UBS tripled their price target on its stock.
Micron helped to lift the tech-focused Nasdaq index to a new record high on Tuesday evening, while SK Hynix pushed South Korea’s KOSPI stock index to a fresh peak on Wednesday.
Stock index provider MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan also hit a record high.
These moves reflected “a broader shift in the AI trade”, said Anna Macdonald, an investment strategy director at Hargreaves Lansdown. “Investors are looking beyond graphics processors to memory chips, which are essential for storing and moving the vast amounts of data AI systems rely on.”
