The company dropped its preconditions on Friday. The NSEU said it would hear new offers from 7 June, three days after the planned 18-day walkout ends.
Samsung Electronics asked its largest union on Friday to come back to the bargaining table without conditions. The union said yes, eventually.
Talks could resume on 7 June, the National Samsung Electronics Union told reporters in Seoul, three days after the end of the 18-day strike it intends to begin on 21 May.
It is an unusual thing for an offer of unconditional dialogue to be met with a calendar invitation for after the picket line comes down.
The proposal, confirmed by the union and acknowledged by Samsung in a brief statement, came two days after government-mediated negotiations collapsed at the National Labor Relations Commission.
Investors took the response badly. Samsung shares traded as much as 7.6% lower on the Korea Exchange on Friday morning, against a 1.1% decline in the benchmark KOSPI, before paring losses through the session.
The dispute is not really about pay. The bonus formula is the fight. The NSEU wants the existing 50%-of-base-salary cap on performance bonuses removed and a profit-sharing scheme written into the contract, set at 15% of the chip division’s operating profit.
Samsung has offered a one-time payment for 2026 and a profit share equal to about 13%, but has not committed to a permanent structural change.
The reference point is one company over. SK Hynix agreed last September to scrap its bonus cap and allocate 10% of annual operating profit to staff, locked in for ten years.
On 2026 forecasts, that arithmetic produces six-figure dollar payouts per worker across roughly 35,000 staff. Samsung’s chip workers, watching that math play out next door, want the same formula on paper rather than at the chairman’s discretion.
The timing is what makes the standoff acute. Samsung’s $1tn market capitalisation, crossed earlier this month, was driven almost entirely by the chip division, and the bulk of that by the HBM and server DRAM lines the union is threatening to take offline.
JPMorgan has estimated an 18-day stoppage would cost Samsung more than 4tn won (around $2.9bn) in direct semiconductor revenue. The union’s own estimate runs higher, at up to 30tn won. The figures are not directly comparable, but both sit above the gap separating the two sides at the table.
The South Korean government has been publicly anxious about the prospect of a walkout. Semiconductors accounted for roughly 37% of the country’s total exports in April, according to trade ministry data, and the prime minister and finance minister have both said a strike at the world’s largest memory chipmaker should be avoided.
The labour minister has so far declined to invoke emergency arbitration, a rarely used mechanism that would freeze industrial action for 30 days.
Samsung said in its statement that it remained open to dialogue and regretted the union’s decision to proceed.
The NSEU, which has roughly 36,000 members and represents about 30% of the workforce, said it would consider any fresh proposal in writing before 21 May, but would not delay the strike to negotiate further. The 7 June date, the union said, was not an opening position; it was the calendar.
