The ongoing debate inside and outside Samsung Electronics over its semiconductor division's enormous operating profit and bonus payouts weighs heavily on me. From disputes over bonus distribution to pressure for broader social sharing and demands that suppliers receive a cut of the gains, the conversation has unfortunately narrowed to a single question: how to spend the company's resources. What Samsung Electronics actually needs right now is bold investment and structural reform — to decisively strengthen its core semiconductor competitiveness and build it into a company-wide AI system ecosystem.
As a semiconductor engineering professor who joined Samsung Electronics' semiconductor division in 1986, spent more than 35 years there and retired having witnessed its history firsthand, I feel compelled to speak plainly. The profit momentum that the AI investment boom has delivered is a blessing — but we must be honest: it owes more to a surge in demand and a rising tide across the industry than to a hard-won technological edge over rivals.
Samsung Electronics is the world's only fully integrated electronics company with design capability, foundry processes, advanced memory chips, mobile devices and home appliances all under one roof. That overwhelming infrastructure and the organic synergies it enables are assets unique to Samsung that no competitor can easily replicate. Yet those synergies are already being undermined by deepening resentment over differentiated bonuses across divisions and business units. New mechanisms are urgently needed to restore smooth cross-divisional cooperation.
To hold its leadership against the tight alliances of global big-tech players, Samsung must aggressively develop its semiconductor core — the heart of the company — and link it tightly to its finished-product businesses, completing what could be called a "chip-to-product company-wide AI system ecosystem." The organization's compensation structure must be recalibrated to support that goal. Research and design units that depend on cross-divisional collaboration, for example, should have a portion of their bonuses tied to a "company-wide AI performance bonus" benchmarked against overall or division-wide operating profit, incentivizing cooperation. A new "turnkey incentive" covering the full chain from design through manufacturing and packaging would help break down barriers between departments. For semiconductor line production teams — where fine-process yield and utilization rates around the clock are everything — a dedicated "productivity bonus regime" should be strengthened to keep frontline motivation at its peak. The memory and foundry manufacturing fab divisions, the foundation of Samsung's manufacturing capability, should be reframed as a shared-fate unit to maximize production synergies. Structural profit concentration driven by short-term results must not be allowed to marginalize or demoralize the foundry division; securing its competitiveness and investment resources is essential to hatching many more golden eggs.
Support for the supplier ecosystem also needs a paradigm shift — away from one-time cash distributions and toward the provision of technology infrastructure. To help domestic materials, components and equipment companies with wafer evaluation and yield verification — their most pressing need — Samsung should use idle equipment and retained earnings to build dedicated "mini fabs" for its suppliers. When those partners develop genuine global-level technological self-sufficiency and the semiconductor ecosystem as a whole grows stronger, Samsung's supply chain stability and fundamental business competitiveness will rise with them.
In the coming era of edge AI and on-device computing, the battlefield will be decided — as it was in mobile — by the ability to vertically integrate chips, hardware, operating systems and AI algorithms. I sincerely hope that the next generation at Samsung will stop the war of attrition over fragmented individual gains and reawaken the strengths of the integrated electronics company Samsung has long been. Innovating internal integration and the compensation structure is the wisest survival strategy for making Samsung Electronics the undisputed leader of a comprehensive AI system ecosystem that no rival can challenge.
Jung Soon-moon is a professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST).
nbgkoo@heraldcorp.com
