Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Chip-sector bonuses supplied a third of Korea's 3.1% first-half pay rise
The Korea Enterprises Federation credits electronics and telecommunications, 2.4% of the country's regular workers, with 32.4% of the first-half increase in monthly pay, and without the sector the average rose 2.2% instead of 3.1%.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Total monthly pay per regular South Korean worker averaged 4.318 million won in the first half, up 3.1% or 131,000 won, a pace 0.4 percentage points below last year's 3.5%.
- Fixed pay growth slowed to 2.2% from 2.9% while special payments such as performance bonuses accelerated to 9.3% from 8.1%, averaging a record 601,000 won a month.
- Electronics and telecommunications, which includes Samsung Electronics and SK hynix, averaged 9.434 million won a month, up 23.1%, with special payments up 66.0% against 1.8% elsewhere.
- The Korea Enterprises Federation puts the sector at 2.4% of regular workers, about 377,000 people, and at 32.4% of the overall wage increase.
- Only six of the 17 industries surveyed saw wage growth accelerate, and pay fell in five, including electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply, down 3.1%, and construction, down 0.7%.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Workers at firms with fewer than 300 staff have no bonus channel to ride chip earnings: their special payments grew 0.6%, down from 3.0%, so their 2.1% raise is whatever base pay delivered.
- decision Large employers chose the cost they can stop paying, holding base pay growth to 1.4% while special payments grew 14.7%, so next year's committed payroll is lighter than a 4.8% headline suggests.
- exposure The national pay number now moves with memory earnings: a 66.0% surge in one sector's bonuses has to be sustained at that level, not just repeated in direction, to hold the average up.
- contradiction The only public account of the split comes from the employers' side, and the federation that collected the data used it to argue against benchmarking pay demands on high performers.
The federation's 32.4% can be rebuilt out of the rest of its own report. Electronics and telecommunications pay averaged 9.434 million won a month, up 23.1% [8], which puts the year-earlier figure at 7.664 million and the gain at 1.770 million won a worker [1]. Across 377,000 workers, that is about 667 billion won a month [3]. If those 377,000 are 2.4% of regular workers [9], the regular workforce is near 15.7 million [2], and 131,000 won apiece [1] comes to roughly 2.058 trillion won a month [3]. 667 divided by 2,058 is 32.4% [3].
So a third, and the other two-thirds came from the 15.3 million workers outside the sector [2], where monthly pay averaged 4.187 million won and rose 2.2% [10]. Take that off the headline and electronics and telecommunications supplied 0.9 of the 3.1 percentage points [4]. Pay in the sector runs 2.25 times the average outside it [8].
The bonus money is not a one-off spike either. Special payments averaged 601,000 won a month, 13.9% of total monthly pay [5], and the level has risen three years running, from 509,000 won in 2024 to 550,000 in 2025, which leaves this year 18.1% above 2024 [3][6]. At firms with 300 or more employees they averaged 1.824 million won a month, up 234,000 won from 1.590 million [6][7].
Ha Sang-woo, a director at the federation, said the improvement in chip earnings drove the rise in special payments in the sector and had a substantial effect on overall wage growth [13]. "Companies should share their performance with workers, but they need to set the size of those payments with future investment and mid- to long-term competitiveness in mind, and distribute them fairly according to the performance and contribution of organizations and individuals," Ha said [14]. "We should be wary of demands for wage increases that exceed a company's own ability to pay, based on the compensation at other high-performing companies," Ha added [15].
There are two ways to read the same table. One is substitution: large employers held base pay growth to 1.4%, down from 3.4%, while pushing special payments to 14.7% growth [5], buying labour peace with money they are not committed to paying again. The other, and the more interesting version, is that a bonus paid three years in a row is a level, not a bonus, and the 601,000 won average only has to hold for total pay to hold with it [2].
In my view the substitution read is the better one, and the full-year data will settle it. If fixed pay growth at 300-plus firms comes back toward last year's 3.4% while special payments keep compounding near 14.7% [5], nothing was substituted and this was a good chip year that also happened to be a good base-pay year. If fixed pay stays near 1.4% [5], the 0.9 points that electronics contributed [4] are what the national figure loses when memory earnings turn.
What to watch
- Chip earnings this year, since they set the bonus pool the federation's next report will measure.
- Autumn bargaining outside electronics, where unions can now point to a sector average of 9.434 million won a month.
- Whether the 2.7-point gap between large-firm and small-firm pay growth widens back toward last year's 3.0 points.