SEOUL – In South Korea’s booming chip sector, bonuses that bullish forecasts suggest could soon approach US$900,000 (S$1.15 million) are deepening concerns over widening inequality.
At SK Hynix, one-off payouts tied to the artificial intelligence boom are forecast to swell to multiples of earnings in traditionally high-income professions. The windfall illustrates the Bank of Korea’s concern that the tech bonanza will skew the economy “K-shaped” – where a few workers vault ahead while the rest languish on a downward slope.
It’s a phenomenon that was on display on April 23 in Seoul, when SK Hynix reported a fivefold jump in quarterly operating profit to a record 37.61 trillion won (S$32.4 billion). Less than half an hour later, the BOK said gross domestic product surged 1.7 per cent in the first quarter, led by tech exports, topping even the most bullish economist forecasts.
SK Hynix’s sales nearly tripled as it rides a wave of demand from AI and data centres, pushing memory prices sharply higher. The scale of the boom is being mirrored across the sector: Samsung Electronics preliminary results released in April showed first-quarter operating profit surging more than eightfold to a record.
In 2025, SK Hynix struck a landmark deal with its labour union that saw it agree to allocate about 10 per cent of operating profit to employees as bonuses. The result: an average payout of about 1.5 times annual salaries in 2025.
Those figures are about to balloon. Annual operating profit at SK Hynix could approach 207.4 trillion won this year, and 272.4 trillion won in 2027, according to analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. At the bullish end of expectations, Macquarie Group projects profit will reach 447 trillion won in 2027.
Based on its domestic workforce of roughly 34,000, that implies average payouts of about US$400,000 to US$540,000 per employee in 2026 and an eye-popping US$878,000 in 2027 if Macquarie’s earnings forecasts turn out to be accurate.
The company, which declined to comment on bonuses, said on an earnings call on April 23 that it plans to channel much of the windfall back into the business.
Even bonuses at the lower end of estimates would be more than 20 times the average annual income in the nation of almost 30 million workers. Postings in an anonymous workplace online community capture some of the backlash from workers in industries that are being left behind.
A Hyundai Motor employee wrote that bonuses of this magnitude “make it hard to talk about fairness in a competitive labour market.” A veterinarian posting on the same platform described spending years in training, taking on debt and working long hours, only to earn a fraction of what some chip workers receive in bonuses alone.
It’s a division that’s also vexing the central bank. The BOK has warned that gains from technology sectors, equity markets and AI are disproportionately accruing to higher-income groups, with limited spillover to the broader economy.
The central bank has said 2026 growth would be about 0.4 percentage point lower excluding the IT sector, warning that widening disparities across industries could create a gap between headline growth and perceived economic conditions. Such a “K-shaped recovery” won’t be sustainable, it added.
The chip sector’s heavy reliance on imported equipment and its capital-intensive nature means the impact of the boom on the broader labour market and domestic investment is limited, said Jeong-Woo Park, an economist at Nomura Holdings. Still, the gains can be distributed more broadly through financial channels, such as stock ownership and shareholder returns, he added.
“Focusing directly on the imbalance doesn’t solve it – it’s like scratching an itch that only gets worse,” Mr Park said. “The focus should be on strengthening indirect channels to spread the gains more broadly.” BLOOMBERG
