SK hynix Employees Earned an Average of 144 Million Won in the First Half of the Year

CEO Noh Jung Kwak Receives 26.1 Billion Won Including a 20.4 Billion Won Bonus

It has been revealed that SK hynix employees received an average salary of 144 million won per person in the first half of this year.

SK hynix Headquarters in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. Yonhap News.

According to the semiannual report disclosed by SK hynix on August 14, the total number of employees in the first half of this year was 36,150, an increase of 2,525 compared to the same period last year. There were 24,238 male employees and 11,912 female employees.

The total salary paid to employees amounted to 5.076521 trillion won. Based on the average number of employees per quarter, the average salary per person was 144 million won, which is an increase of 27 million won (about 23%) from the 117 million won average salary in the first half of the previous year. By gender, male employees received an average of 157 million won, and female employees received 118 million won.

If the six months’ salary is simply converted into a monthly average, it amounts to 24 million won. The salary includes not only basic pay but also bonuses and other forms of income classified as earned income for tax purposes. The average length of service among all employees was 13.3 years.

Noh Jung Kwak, Chief Executive Officer, received a total of 2.6095 billion won in the first half of the year, including a salary of 1.25 billion won, a bonus of 20.465 billion won, 4.379 billion won from exercising stock options, and 1 million won in other earned income. This is about 181 times the average employee salary.

Kwak’s annual salary was set at 2.5 billion won. The bonus included performance compensation for management results for 2025, as well as the settlement amount from previously granted long-term performance-based incentives. The profit from exercising stock options was generated as CEO Kwak exercised 5,269 shares at 138,980 won per share. The market price at the time of exercise was 970,000 won per share.

Sunyong Cha, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), received 1.094 billion won in total, consisting of a 550 million won salary, a 6.01 billion won bonus, 4.379 billion won from exercising stock options, and 1 million won in other earned income.

For the first half of this year, SK hynix recorded sales of 131.895 trillion won and operating profit of 98.1529 trillion won. The operating margin was approximately 74.4%. As investment in AI data centers drove up demand for high bandwidth memory (HBM) and high-capacity server DRAM, both business performance and the scale of performance-based rewards expanded together.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.