World’s largest foundry TSMC has decided to roll out a rewards card for employees. It has promised to raise this year’s performance bonuses by an average of more than 30%. The move is aimed at calming growing discontent within the company.
At a closed-door town hall meeting on the 27th, Chairman Wei Zhejia said he was confident that profit-sharing payments for Taiwanese employees would rise by more than 30% on average, Bloomberg reported that day. The CEO himself took the microphone.
◆ Samsung shook the balance
Samsung Electronics’ labor and management narrowly avoided a strike and reached a tentative agreement on wages and performance-based bonuses. The strike crisis was dramatically settled. The problem was the size of the payout.
News spread that semiconductor division employees would receive bonuses averaging about $340,000 each. As that figure made its way to Taiwan, it caused a stir. Inside TSMC, which has no formal union, tensions rose.
Questions emerged over whether a company posting record profits amid the AI boom was nevertheless falling short on compensation. Concerns quickly spread through the company’s online forums and anonymous bulletin boards. Some employees even argued that they should speak up like Samsung workers.
Under Taiwanese law, the threshold for collective strikes is high. Even so, the fact that unrest surfaced at all was seen as unusual. The significance lies in the fact that dissatisfaction emerged in an organization without a union channel for bargaining.
◆ Why the chairman stepped in personally
Chairman Wei’s town hall was a self-initiated session. He brought the bonus increase plan and personally stepped in to soothe employees. While the company has largely avoided making official comments, it did say in a statement earlier this week that this year’s increase in profit-sharing would exceed last year’s level.
This response is being read as a sign of the competition to secure talent. Semiconductor advanced-process technology ultimately comes from people. At a time when demand for cutting-edge chips is surging in the AI era, the departure of key engineers would mean a leak in technological competitiveness. If compensation gaps widen, the risk of talent outflow also grows.
Chairman Wei has long emphasized that, in pricing policy, he values long-term stability over short-term opportunism. Thanks to that management approach, TSMC lifted its gross profit margin to 66% this year. That also means it has ample room to pay more.
◆ What the numbers say about the distribution structure
TSMC’s bonuses are not decided on a whim. They follow rules written into its articles of incorporation.
The company is required to set aside at least 1% of annual net profit as a bonus pool. For the 2025 profit-sharing program, it has already allocated about NT$103 billion, or about 4.93 trillion won, up 46.6% from the previous year. As net profit rises, distributions automatically increase as well.
Bloomberg said TSMC has expanded bonuses in line with the rate of net profit growth, so this year too the increase is likely to be larger than last year’s. That is why the chairman’s promise of a 30% raise is not empty talk.
In the end, this issue goes beyond a single company’s bonus negotiations. It is about how the windfall from the AI-driven semiconductor boom will be shared, and among whom. The greater the record profits a company earns, the higher employees’ expectations for compensation become. The competition for talent between Taiwan and South Korea’s two semiconductor powerhouses is now playing out on pay statements.