Chairman Chey Tae-won: "Last Year's SK Hynix Salaries Will Be Returned to Employees"

[Asia Economy Reporter Suyeon Woo] Recently, amid growing dissatisfaction within SK Hynix regarding this year's performance bonuses, SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won made a statement expressing his intention to share his own SK Hynix salary from last year with the employees.

At the M16 semiconductor plant completion ceremony held on the 1st at the headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, Chairman Chey stated, "I want to return the compensation I received from Hynix last year to the employees," expressing his intention to share his salary from last year with Hynix staff. Based on 2019, Chairman Chey’s salary from SK Hynix was approximately 3 billion KRW, which, when divided by the roughly 28,000 employees, amounts to about 100,000 KRW per person. The level of Chairman Chey’s salary for 2020 has not yet been disclosed.

Choi Tae-won, Chairman of SK Group

The reason Chairman Chey unusually announced his intention to forgo his salary is due to rising dissatisfaction within the company over the scale of performance bonus payments. On the 28th of last month, Hynix announced that it would pay 400% of the amount equivalent to one-twentieth of the employee’s salary as this year’s Profit Sharing (PS) bonus.

However, despite SK Hynix’s operating profit last year reaching 5 trillion KRW, an increase of over 80% compared to the previous year, dissatisfaction began to surface internally because the performance bonuses were at the same level as in 2019.

Additionally, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic last year, the semiconductor industry improved due to the 'untact boom,' leading to discrepancies in performance bonus scales compared to peer companies, raising issues of fairness. After the performance bonus scale was decided, demands to disclose the calculation method flooded the company bulletin board, and the number of office worker union members surged, reflecting active expression of opinions among employees.

At the completion ceremony, Chairman Chey reportedly said, "I feel sorry that internal dissatisfaction among employees regarding performance bonuses is increasing," adding, "Although the company calculated the bonuses according to established standards, the dissatisfaction that arises is a challenge we must overcome together."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.