SK hynix has begun a bonus war that is only starting

The author is the economy news editor of the JoongAng Ilbo.

Comedian Lee Su-ji has recently earned praise not only as an entertainer but almost as a cultural anthropologist. Through her YouTube channel "Hot Issue Ji," she has built an audience of more than 1.3 million subscribers by exposing the vanity and status obsession embedded in Korean society.



In one skit, Lee plays an unruly hospital patient who casually boasts to a nurse, "My son works at SK hynix." Moments later, her son appears wearing a clumsy-looking work vest with a taped-on SK hynix logo — recently depicted as the ultimate blind date outfit.

The joke resonated because the controversy surrounding bonuses at SK hynix is no longer just a business issue. The image of ordinary office workers suddenly becoming multimillionaires has become a constant topic across YouTube and social media.



The debate began in February when SK hynix distributed massive profit-sharing bonuses to employees. The company removed the ceiling on performance incentives and decided to distribute 10 percent of annual operating profit to workers. Fueled by the semiconductor boom driven by AI, some employees reportedly received bonuses approaching two and a half times their annual base salary.

Attention has now shifted to this year's potential payouts. Securities analysts forecast that SK hynix could post operating profits exceeding 250 trillion won ($171 billion) this year. If 10 percent of that amount were divided among roughly 35,000 employees, the average payout could theoretically approach 700 million won per worker, calculations that have fueled heated online discussion.

On social media, some have joked that spending just a few years at SK hynix now resembles winning the lottery. Korea has long celebrated the "salaryman myth" — employees rising from humble beginnings to become CEOs earning enormous salaries. But the idea of an entire work force suddenly receiving life-changing wealth is almost unprecedented in Korea's industrial history.

Employees at Samsung Electronics, which posted even larger sales and profits than SK hynix, were unlikely to remain silent. Labor tensions there have intensified, with unions threatening a general strike while negotiating with management. Complaints about compensation are spreading across other industries as well.

In Silicon Valley, compensation packages worth 500 million won to 1 billion won annually — roughly $345,000 to $690,000 — are common for top engineers, according to the Korea Corporate Governance Forum. But such rewards are reserved for core talent. Compensation systems in the United States are designed around individual performance, strategic value and the risk of losing workers to competitors. Even within the same team, salaries can differ severalfold.

As AI investment intensifies into what many describe as an arms race, competition for talent has become fiercer. Stories circulating in Silicon Valley include Meta Platforms offering compensation packages reportedly worth $100 million annually to recruit key researchers from OpenAI, while Microsoft reportedly hired researchers away from Google DeepMind with multimillion-dollar offers. At the same time, thousands of workers left behind in the AI transition have lost their jobs.

That is why the SK hynix controversy extends beyond simple envy. It raises difficult questions about fairness and compensation. Who deserves massive bonuses more: longtime workers who devoted decades to the company since its days as Hyundai Electronics, or recently hired employees benefiting from today's semiconductor boom?

The issue reflects a deeper challenge to Korea's traditional compensation culture, where workers collectively shared both success and hardship.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect answer. Neither SK hynix's approach nor Silicon Valley's model offers a complete solution. Even Oliver Hart, the Harvard economist who won the Nobel Prize for research on contracts and incentives, argued in "Firms, Contracts,...