Until now, the management of Samsung Electronics has managed not only to ignore the demands of the trade union, which were put forward at the beginning of the year, but also to declare the inability of the ongoing employee strike to significantly influence the company’s production activities. Determined protesters, meanwhile, threaten with their actions to disrupt the production of HBM chips, which are in great demand on the market.
Image Source: Samsung Electronics
As Bloomberg notes, union leaders are now calling on employees of the Samsung plant involved in the production of HBM to join the strike. Several hundred employees at the Pyeongtaek plant that produces this class of memory took to the streets on Thursday and Friday to participate in a strike. According to the union representatives leading the protest, potential damage in such an important area of activity for the company should make Samsung management more accommodating in the issue of increasing wages.
As Samsung tries to become Nvidia’s trusted supplier, such risks could be significant enough for the company’s management to pay attention to the protesters’ demands. Although Samsung is the world’s largest memory chip maker, in the HBM segment the company lags far behind the smaller South Korean company SK hynix, which controls half the market. Samsung shares fell up to 4% on Friday morning, but a similar movement was observed in the Asian market as a whole, so it cannot be called a pronounced reaction to the union’s actions. Samsung management expressed the hope that it will be able to resume negotiations with the protesters, and the latter’s actions will not affect the company’s ability to fulfill its obligations to customers. Experts expect that even in conditions of highly automated production of advanced components such as HBM, the need to attract personnel for quality control remains, and the actions of personnel participating in the strike may affect the quality of manufactured products, at a minimum.