[Edaily Reporter JAEMIN SONG ] It has been revealed that Kwak No-jeong, President and CEO of SK hynix, received approximately 26.1 billion won in compensation for the first half of this year. The average salary per employee was 144 million won.

According to SK hynix’s semi-annual report released on the 14th, President Kwak’s total compensation for the first half of the year amounted to 26.095 billion won. This included a base salary of 1.25 billion won, a bonus of 20.465 billion won, and gains from exercising stock options totaling 4.379 billion won.

The company factored into the bonus calculation the fact that it recorded its best-ever performance since its founding last year, with revenue of 97.1 trillion won and operating profit of 47.2 trillion won. Other factors considered in the evaluation included the establishment of a mass production system for HBM4, the expansion of HBM3E sales, the mass production of 321-layer NAND, and the groundbreaking for the first fab at the Yongin Semiconductor Cluster.

As of the end of June this year, SK hynix had a total of 36,150 employees. The average salary per employee for the first half of the year was 144 million won, with Namsung employees earning 157 million won and female employees earning 118 million won. Total payroll amounted to 5.0765 trillion won.

The company also significantly increased its investment in research and development (R&D) to secure future competitiveness. R&D expenses for the first half totaled 6.0428 trillion won, amounting to approximately 90% of last year’s annual R&D expenses of 6.7325 trillion won. Of this amount, 5.8163 trillion won was expensed, while 226.6 billion won was capitalized as development costs, classified as intangible assets.

SK hynix is focusing its research capabilities on developing products for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC), including HBM4, next-generation DRAM, high-capacity DDR5, 321-layer NAND, and enterprise solid-state drives (eSSDs). The ratio of R&D expenses to revenue was 4.6%.

Capital expenditures based on tangible asset acquisitions in the first half totaled 17.595 trillion won, and the average capacity utilization rate at domestic and overseas production facilities remained at 100%. The number of customers accounting for more than 10% of revenue increased from one in the first half of last year to two this year. These two customers accounted for 13.35% and 13.03% of revenue, respectively.