With the government's intervention and the concession of senior management, Samsung's century-long strike has been called off, but the storm is not over yet.

After an all-night tug-of-war negotiation, Samsung Electronics and its union employees finally reached a consensus and settled on the performance bonus plan for 2026, temporarily defusing the industry storm that could have affected the entire semiconductor industry.

According to the settlement agreement reached by both parties, Samsung Electronics will establish a dedicated special performance bonus pool for the semiconductor equipment solutions department. The bonus will be calculated at 10.5% of the department's operating profit, and the original bonus cap will be completely removed. According to industry estimates, if Samsung's semiconductor business successfully achieves its profit target this year, employees in its core memory chip division could receive a maximum annual bonus of approximately 2.72 million yuan.

As long as this memory cycle continues to rise, this figure will only become more exaggerated.

This labor strike is the largest and most far-reaching labor-management game in Samsung's nearly half-century history. Although this crisis has temporarily come to an end, for the large-scale Samsung Group, the calm achieved through short-term concessions on interests is not stable.

A Risk That Could Disrupt the Global Chip Supply Chain

The outbreak of this labor dispute is not accidental. In essence, it is the long-accumulated contradictions within Samsung, such as uneven internal interest distribution and differentiated departmental development, under the high-speed dividends of the AI industry, which finally broke out concentratedly this month.

In the past two years, the rapid rise of AI has driven a surge in global memory demand. Samsung's semiconductor business has seen its performance soar, with revenue and profits reaching new highs. However, the dividends of the company's rapid growth have not benefited front-line employees. The increase in employees' salaries and bonuses has been modest, forming a sharp contrast with the company's substantial profits. As a result, the long-accumulated dissatisfaction has continued to ferment.

As Samsung's local competitor, SK Hynix has also seized the AI dividends by leveraging its advantages in the HBM track. To stabilize its core team, SK Hynix cancelled the bonus cap early on, and its employees' annual bonuses were once three times that of Samsung employees. Naturally, this has led to widespread dissatisfaction among Samsung employees and caused a large number of core talents to leave.

So, a week ago, due to the irreconcilable differences in the salary and bonus system, the Samsung Electronics union launched a full-member vote. With an overwhelming approval rate of 93.1%, a comprehensive 18-day strike was finalized, and the shutdown plan was imminent.

In the semiconductor industry, due to the special nature of the production line, once the equipment is shut down, it takes weeks or even months of debugging to restore the normal yield rate. It is not simply a matter of resuming work to resume production. According to calculations by multiple authoritative institutions, if the 18-day strike really takes place, Samsung's direct operating profit loss will reach $14 billion, and a large number of high-end wafers with a unit price of over $20,000 may be completely scrapped.

In addition, this shutdown will also drag down South Korea's annual economic growth rate by 0.5 percentage points, causing heavy damage to the South Korean domestic economy.

At that time, the global AI competition had entered a white-hot stage, and memory chips and HBM memory were already in short supply. As the world's largest memory chip manufacturer, Samsung's business volume accounts for nearly a quarter of South Korea's total exports and is the core hub of the global semiconductor supply chain.

Once the production line stops and supply is cut off, the AI computing power expansion and product launches of technology companies such as NVIDIA will be forced to stop, and the development rhythm of the global AI industry will be comprehensively affected.

Finally, under the huge industry and economic risks, the South Korean government also intervened. The South Korean labor minister and even the president successively pressured and coordinated, and the court also issued an injunction requiring the enterprise to ensure the normal operation of the core production line.

With the coordination of multiple parties and mutual concessions, the labor and management finally reached a settlement: Samsung's management offered a high-profit sharing plan, and the union called off the strike plan completely, thus resolving this crisis.

Imbalanced Distribution and Internal Fragmentation

Interestingly, it's not that easy to get this money. 40% of this bonus pool will be evenly divided among all divisions under the semiconductor department, and the remaining 60% will be distributed according to the performance of each division. The more money a division makes, the more bonus it gets.

Then there is another problem here - the contradictions between Samsung's departments still exist.

Currently, there is a significant polarization within Samsung. Divisions related to memory chips and HBM continue to make profits relying on AI dividends and are the core profit sources of the company, while divisions such as logic chips and wafer foundry have been in a long-term loss state. Employees in the profitable departments believe that the loss-making departments are dragging down the overall efficiency, while employees in the loss-making departments are envious of the high bonuses. The bonus rules that favor the core profitable departments by the management are contrary to the union's demand for universal salary increases, which also makes the internal rift more prominent. The opposition between departments will not be resolved by the new bonus policy but will continue to intensify, and the internal cohesion of the enterprise will also continue to decline.

Lee Jae-yong, the chairman of Samsung, was in a dilemma during this storm. Internally, long-serving employees were dissatisfied and even lost their sense of belonging to the enterprise. Externally, Wall Street capital and corporate shareholders continued to put pressure on the company. The capital side always insisted that corporate profits should be given priority to investors, and high employee bonuses would compress shareholders' returns.

Affected by this, multiple securities firms have downgraded Samsung's target stock price and issued warnings about the company's long-term profit prospects.

Finally, Lee Jae-yong chose a compromise approach. Instead of paying the bonus in cash directly, the bonus will be exchanged with Samsung's own stocks. In this way, if Samsung's stock price rises, employees will make money. If the stock price falls, employees will also have to bear the losses. This method not only relieves the company's short-term cash flow pressure but also ties employees' earnings to the company's stock price, forcing employees to focus on improving production yield.

Currently, this labor-management settlement agreement still needs to be confirmed through a vote by union members, and the final implementation effect is still unknown. However, it is certain that this storm is just a pain in Samsung's transformation and development, and similar labor disputes may continue to occur in the future.

For the Samsung Group, which supports the economic lifeline of South Korea, this storm is not the end. The real internal struggle and tests have just begun.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Meku.com". The author is Meku.com, and it is published by 36Kr with authorization.