Lee Jae-yong's team refuses to back down! Samsung Electronics employees are very helpless, and many Samsung employees are already preparing to jump ship to SK Hynix. SK Hynix has seen a surge in performance thanks to its market advantage in HBM, with operating profit reaching 37.6 trillion won in the first quarter of 2026. Although the absolute value is not as high as Samsung's, SK Hynix is more willing to share profits with its employees.

The base salary of a Samsung technician is 76 million won, and the performance bonus received at Samsung in 2025 was 38 million won. For someone in the same position at SK Hynix, this figure easily exceeds 100 million won.

When engineers with the same qualifications can earn 3 to 10 times their own income at a competitor, "loyalty" becomes the cheapest commodity.

SK Hynix has also seen this opportunity and has launched a large-scale talent poaching mode, aggressively recruiting fresh graduates and experienced technical talent. Especially in the field of high-bandwidth memory packaging—the most critical position under the wave of AI chip explosion—SK Hynix already has over a hundred former Samsung employees internally.