Samsung workers are heading for a strike over SK Hynix's bonus checks

The Samsung union is asking for 15% of operating profit to go into a bonus pool, plans a rally at Samsung’s Pyeongtaek campus on April 23, and has approved a walkout from May 21 to June 7. The trigger: SK Hynix engineers across the street are cashing bonus checks four times larger for building roughly the same chips.

The math the union is citing

SK Hynix removed its bonus cap in September 2025 and committed 10% of operating profit to a dividend pool for its roughly 34,500 employees. The Korea Herald reports that SK Hynix workers earned about 140 million won in 2024 bonuses on top of an average salary near 100 million won. With 2026 operating profit projected near 200 trillion won, the internal estimate is roughly 580 million won in bonuses per employee.

Samsung’s memory division sat out the HBM gold rush. Its bonuses for the same year came in around a third of SK Hynix’s, even though it has the larger foundry and logic businesses. That gap is what the union’s 15%-of-operating-profit demand is trying to close. On Samsung’s projected roughly 297 trillion won full-year operating profit, 15% is a 45 trillion won pool, which works out to roughly 400 million won per head across the loss-making logic and foundry divisions. Samsung’s existing performance pay ceiling caps the outcome regardless of company profit; the union wants that ceiling gone too.

Over 200 Samsung memory engineers have already defected to SK Hynix in the last four months, per the same Herald reporting. That’s a rate Samsung cannot sustain without hurting the DRAM and NAND node roadmaps, and management knows it. The HBM race with SK Hynix and Micron is not one Samsung can run with a thinning bench.

The court move and the rally

Samsung filed a petition this week asking a South Korean court to block illegal strike activities by its unions. The company is careful to frame this as not opposing the right to strike, only the unlawful conduct (union occupation of production lines, and a handful of other tactics that blurred into that). The petition lands as the union plans its Pyeongtaek rally, a symbolic escalation ahead of the May 21 walkout window.

Reuters is reporting that analysts are modeling 5 to 10 trillion won in potential production losses from an 18-day full stoppage. That’s a credible number if the strike hits the HBM lines during a quarter when SK Hynix just posted a five-fold quarterly profit jump on HBM demand, while Samsung is still trying to catch up on next-gen stacks. Hyundai workers are watching Samsung closely; their own bonus demands are running in parallel, tracking the SK Hynix baseline.

What this means for you

If you’re buying memory into 2027, the strike is the next supply-side event after the HBM/DRAM crunch we covered last week. An 18-day Samsung stoppage at the HBM node won’t show in spot prices immediately, because spot is already starved. It will show up in contract prices when Q3 negotiations start. Expect the major buyers (hyperscalers, GPU OEMs) to start padding orders pre-emptively, which will make the squeeze worse before it gets better.

If you’re watching semiconductor equity or vendor health, the real story is labor cost structure. SK Hynix raised the floor last September and it’s pulling talent in a way that Samsung can’t match without rewriting its own pay ceiling. That’s a structural change, not a cyclical one. The winner of the HBM race over the next two years is going to be whoever can hire, keep, and schedule the physicists and process engineers who actually make the nodes work. Samsung’s memory division has the scale. It’s now fighting to keep the people.