On June 24, reports surfaced that storage chip giant Samsung Electronics is gearing up to repurchase nearly 90 trillion won (about $39.9 billion RMB) worth of its own shares. The cash raised will be used to hand out employee bonuses, with full details expected to be announced very soon. Why the rush? It all comes down to a deal Samsung struck with its labor union: they promised to pay special performance bonuses using their own stock.
The news hit the market hard. On the morning of the 24th, Samsung’s stock price surged nearly 10%. As of this writing, the share price sits at 3.35 million won, up more than 7%. With a total market cap hitting around 1,949 trillion won, Samsung has officially reclaimed the crown as South Korea’s largest company by market value—a title it held steady for 26 years straight. Just two days prior, on June 22, SK Hynix had briefly overtaken Samsung to claim the top spot on the KOSPI index, but today, Samsung is back on top.
Back on May 27, the Samsung Electronics union confirmed that members had voted to approve the interim wage agreement, with a solid 73.7% in favor. That vote was the green light needed to cancel a planned 18-day strike that could have shut down production lines.
Here’s the breakdown of that deal: both sides agreed to raise the average annual salary for all employees by 6.2%. But the real kicker is for the core Semiconductor (DS) division. They’ve set up a “Special Operating Performance Bonus” funded by 10.5% of operating profits, and there’s no cap on how much can be paid out.
In the total bonus pool, 40% goes directly to the entire semiconductor sector, while the remaining 60% is distributed based on how specific business units perform. Under this agreement, if we use an annual salary of 100 million won as the baseline:
- Memory Division Staff: Could pocket a massive 600 million won (approx. 2.7 million RMB) in performance bonuses this fiscal year.
- LSI & Foundry Staff: Employees in logic/simulation chips and foundry services (“Non-Memory Business”) are looking at around 210 million won.
- Equipment Experience Team: These folks will receive company stock worth roughly 6 million won.
This whole labor drama stems from a classic tech industry issue: booming profits in the AI era haven’t been shared fairly. On April 7, Samsung released unaudited guidance for Q1 2026, predicting consolidated operating profits of 57.2 trillion won—a staggering 755% jump year-over-year. This isn’t just a record-breaking quarter for Samsung; it’s bigger than their entire 2025 profit of 43.6 trillion won, marking the most explosive single-quarter earnings performance in Korean corporate history.
According to official data under Korean IFRS (K-IFRS), Samsung’s Q1 sales hit roughly 133 trillion won, up 68.1% from last year. The profit range is locked between 57.1 and 57.3 trillion won, with the midpoint at 57.2 trillion. Compare that to the mere 6.69 trillion won they made in operating profit during the same period last year. In just three months, Samsung achieved what took them almost a year previously, signaling that this global tech titan has officially entered a super-profit cycle driven by AI.
So, what’s fueling this explosion? It’s the insane demand for memory chips. AI servers are driving exponential growth, completely reshaping the global supply and demand landscape. A single AI server needs multiples of the HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) and DRAM compared to a standard server. Giants like NVIDIA and AMD are frantically snapping up capacity, leading to tight supplies and skyrocketing prices.
On June 23, industry sources revealed that Samsung’s sixth-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM4) sales have already broken the $1 billion barrier. Samsung kicked off mass production of HBM4 globally on February 12, and in just over four months, they’ve achieved these numbers. By the end of June, HBM4 sales are projected to surpass $1.2 billion.
Later that same day, Samsung announced the development of its new Universal Flash Storage (UFS) 5.0 product. It boasts a data transfer bandwidth of 10.8 GB/s, with sequential read speeds of 10.8 GB/s and write speeds of 9.5 GB/s. Compared to the previous UFS 4.1, the UFS 5.0 offers double the transmission bandwidth.
Also on that day, reports from the STAR News indicated that Samsung Display, a subsidiary of Samsung Electronics, has passed Apple’s manufacturing certification for foldable OLED modules. This clears the path for Samsung Display to start mass-producing panels for Apple’s first-ever foldable iPhone. The two companies have signed a three-year exclusive supply agreement, meaning Apple will source all its foldable OLED panels exclusively from Samsung Display during this contract period.
Currently, Samsung Display has activated some rear-end production lines at its Vietnam factory. About 3 million panels are scheduled for delivery before the year ends. While the Vietnam base has a total layout of 80 rear-end lines—with about 50 currently running—the initial Apple order volume is relatively small, so only partial capacity is needed to meet the current delivery requirements.
Looking back to early June, NVIDIA announced it had finalized the supplier list for the core components of its next-gen Vera Rubin AI computing platform: HBM4. The shortlist included the industry titans: Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology. On the 8th, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang met with Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman and Co-CEO Young-Hyun Chun to discuss supply chain coordination and other strategic matters.
