Samsung Electronics' (005930.KS) semiconductor (DS) division recorded a turnover rate in the 1% range over the past five years, the lowest level in Korea and below that of rival SK hynix (000660.KS). Meanwhile, the so-called "Great Resignation" and "job-hopping boom" that swept the labor market during the pandemic are cooling rapidly among employees at large companies overall. Analysts say there is a clear trend of workers at major Korean conglomerates choosing stability and certain compensation at their current jobs over uncertain job changes.
A trend of declining employment mobility was confirmed when corporate analysis firm Leaders Index analyzed data on Monday from 108 companies that disclosed comparable job-change and turnover rates in their sustainability management reports from 2022 to 2024, among the top 500 companies by domestic revenue.
As of 2024, companies with low turnover rates included Doosan Enerbility (034020.KS), SK hynix, Samsung Life Insurance, S-Oil, Samsung Electro-Mechanics and Samsung SDI. Doosan Enerbility had the lowest turnover rate at 1.2% in 2024, while SK hynix declined each year, recording 2.4% in 2022, 1.8% in 2023 and 1.3% in 2024. With the dawn of the artificial intelligence (AI) era, SK hynix, which holds dominance in the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) market, is interpreted to have achieved a "lock-in" effect that prevented the outflow of key talent by strengthening its incentive and compensation system based on strong performance.
Extending the time series to the past five years, the DS division of Samsung Electronics, the world's largest memory chipmaker, recorded a turnover rate in the high 1% range, buoyed by the AI investment boom. An analysis of domestic workplace turnover rates using the same standards as rival SK hynix showed that the average turnover rate over the past five years from 2020 to 2024 was 2.1% for Samsung Electronics and 2.3% for SK hynix, with Samsung Electronics 0.2 percentage point lower.
The overall average turnover rate of the surveyed companies was 9.2% in 2022, when the effects of the pandemic remained, but fell to 7.8% in 2023 and further dropped to 7.7% in 2024. This represents a 1.5 percentage point decline over two years. It is interpreted as reflecting a conservative sentiment of solidifying survival and internal stability in one's current position rather than recklessly changing jobs, amid growing macroeconomic uncertainty such as a global economic slowdown, high interest rates and inflation.
By industry, traditional sectors with stable business structures had low turnover rates. As of 2024, the industry with the lowest turnover rate was trading companies at just 4.3%. It was followed by telecommunications at 4.8%, steel at 5.2%, shipbuilding/machinery/equipment at 5.4%, insurance at 5.5% and energy at 5.5%. The trading, steel and shipbuilding/machinery sectors operate businesses centered on large-scale projects and long-term transactions, giving them high work continuity and relatively little workforce movement. The telecommunications, insurance and energy industries also have low incentives for employees to leave, based on stable domestic markets and high salary and welfare levels.
The industries with the largest decline in turnover rate over three years were the household goods, retail and service sectors, which experienced large workforce outflows during the pandemic. The household goods sector saw its turnover rate fall from 18.0% in 2022 to 11.2% in 2024, a decline of 6.7 percentage points. Over the same period, retail fell from 12.4% to 9.2%, and services dropped from 11.5% to 8.8%. During the pandemic, the contactless boom and expansion of the platform industry drove a rapid movement of workers to IT companies and startups, but after the endemic phase, the cooling of hiring fervor in the platform industry and the normalization of the offline economy appear to have raised the retention rates of workers in existing sectors.
