Huge AI Bonuses Spark South Korea Tech Wealth Fight

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**K. Oanh Ha** (0:13)
After months of tense negotiations, Samsung Electronics struck a deal with its labor union, narrowly averting a strike that would have shut down one of the world's most important chipmakers and South Korea's largest companies.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:26)
A lot of relief there, that tentative deal being reached with the labor union averting that potentially crippling strike that had been slated to begin.

**K. Oanh Ha** (0:33)
The drama surrounding the talks had media outlets around the world taking notice. But it's the details of Samsung's agreement with its workers that has the tech world in particular still buzzing.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:46)
Samsung chip workers could soon get massive AI-fueled bonuses averaging about $340,000 after the company reached a deal to avoid a strike.

**Yoolim Lee** (0:55)
The chips division is the most important business within the conglomerate.

**K. Oanh Ha** (1:01)
Yoolim Lee is Bloomberg's senior tech reporter based in Seoul.

**Yoolim Lee** (1:05)
The semiconductor unit accounted for more than 90% of the company's profit in the first quarter. They are the crown jewel of the company at the moment. So they get the biggest share of the bonus. But together with their salary, this could mean about half a million dollars just in one year.
And potentially more if Samsung makes more profit.

**K. Oanh Ha** (1:32)
Samsung is the world's largest maker of memory chips, the very components powering today's AI boom. Last month, the company's valuation surged past $1 trillion.
That puts it in serious contention with Apple and Nvidia to become the world's most profitable company.

**Yoolim Lee** (1:51)
Its revenue is often described as equivalent to roughly one-fifth of Korea's GDP.

**K. Oanh Ha** (1:56)
But that AI windfall hasn't really trickled down to Samsung employees. After Samsung posted record profits this year, employees demanded a bigger slice of the AI pie too.
And workers threatened to walk out if they didn't get it.

**Yoolim Lee** (2:12)
It wasn't just about a few percentages points in salary. Workers were essentially saying, we helped create this AI boom. Samsung is making extraordinary profits from memory chips. We want a proper share of the upside.
The government twice tried to mediate through a tripartite system we have in Korea for this type of labor disputes, but they failed to lead to any agreement. So in the end, labor minister had to step in at the last minute to mediate the talks.

**K. Oanh Ha** (2:49)
I'm sure there was such a relief when the deal was struck.

**Yoolim Lee** (2:51)
Yeah, absolutely. It was a big relief for a lot of people, but very quickly that turned into resultment inside other parts of Samsung.

**K. Oanh Ha** (3:00)
All Samsung workers are set to receive bonuses this year. But memory chip workers are now set to get a hundred times more than employees who work on more everyday product lines, like smartphones, TVs and home appliances.
And that disparity has set off a firestorm over how to fairly share the AI windfall.

**Yoolim Lee** (3:22)
Samsung avoided the strike, but it's not the end of the debate. It simply moved the debate from the picket lines to the boardrooms and courtrooms and larger global conversation about who gets paid in the AI age. The closer you are to that core bottlenecks like chips, AI models, cloud infrastructure, power, the greater your leverage and compensation.
What Samsung showed is that this is no longer just a Silicon Valley office conversation. It has become a factory floor issue and a global labor issue.

**K. Oanh Ha** (4:05)
This is The Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Oanh Ha. Every week, we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies, and the markets, tycoons and businesses that drive this ever-shifting region. Today on the show, the labor conflict shaking up Samsung, how dispute over bonuses is tearing apart one of the world's most influential tech giants, what it could mean for South Korea's booming tech sector, and how the controversy could ripple out the rest of the world over how AI profits should be shared.
In South Korea, Samsung is more than just a business. It's the country's largest conglomerate, spanning electronics, telecommunications and semiconductors. So when the prospect of a strike arose late last year, Bloomberg's Yoolim Lee and her team started paying close attention.

**Yoolim Lee** (5:03)
Samsung is one of the pillars of the Korean economy and one of the central suppliers of the global technology chain. So a prolonged walkout would have hit three levels at once. First, Samsung itself, especially because it is trying to catch up in advanced memory called high bandwidth memory for AI.
Second, Korea, because semiconductors are so central to exports. They account for 36 percent of Korea's total exports in the first quarter. Third, the global AI supply chain because AI servers and data centers all depend on advanced memory chips. So, the fear was not just that Samsung would lose production for a few days, the fear was that a labor dispute could interrupt Korea's most important industrial engine at the exact moment that the world is racing to build AI infrastructure.