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A 45,000-person labor strike at Samsung's memory chip plants could throw a wrench into the AI boom | Fortune (fortune.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 61 points 3 months ago (16 children)

WTF... Are the numbers in this article accurate?

"Based on 2026 profit forecasts, that translates to average payouts of $460,000 - $477,000 per worker this year across SK Hynix’s 35,000 staff, with projections approaching $900,000 per person next year."

So either the execs are getting billion dollar bonuses or everyone at SK Hynix will just be fucking loaded 😄

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  • [–] 38 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    Although to be fair, these numbers are most likely in Won and whatever AI wrote the article forgot that there's other currencies than USD

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  • [–] 15 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Every article I've read on it over the last month or so has had the same numbers. But you could still be right. Or good ol' human error / miscommunication.

    On the other hand, there's no way they're only getting paid that much won

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Samsung's estimated $73 billion profit (source) divided by 45,000 is over $1.6 million.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    That's all of Samsung Electronics' profit and only the chip plant employees are included in that 45000 figure. If they're going to share the entire company's profits, it would be divided among 260k people. And the demand is 15% of profits to go into a bonus pool. This would be more like 42k per person if divided among everyone.

    SK Hynix employees had the advantage that they only have the super profitable memory and NAND business. Samsung also makes phones and other shit that brought in way less profit per person, as you don't really get 80% profit margins on most products. So if it's just the chip industry employees getting the chip industry profits, the number could be a lot higher, otherwise the chip industry employees' generated profits are going to subsidize bonuses to everyone else as well and the amount per person will be lower.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    They're probably less worried about handing the money over and more worried about all the staff fucking off immediately after recieving it. Insane profits.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Reminds me of that island where everyone was suddenly a millionaire because of the massive amounts of guano (bird shit) they were exporting

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago*

    According to this Samsung is forecasting $73 billion in profits for 2026.

    For 45,000 employees that would be a bit over $1.6 million per person.

    Now, granted, only the SK Hynix profits count and it's only 35,000 employees, but the numbers seem to be in the right ballpark.

    That $460,000 number only seem suspiciously high to most people because we're not use to thinking in billions and we seriously overestimate how tiny the fraction of the value they create ends up in the hands of workers in sectors like High Tech.

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