"Lost 600 Million Won?" Samsung Electronics' turnover rate hits 10%, while SK hynix stays in the 1% range — what's behind the gap?

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[The Financial News] As market conditions have become more uncertain, the wave of job-hopping among large-company employees, once fueled by the pandemic boom, is cooling rapidly.
According to Leaders Index on the 25th, the turnover rate at major domestic conglomerates has declined.
Leaders Index analyzed data from the past three years for 108 companies that disclosed hiring and turnover rates among the 500 largest firms in South Korea by sales, and found that labor mobility has slowed noticeably.
The average turnover rate for the companies surveyed fell from 9.2% in 2022 to 7.8% in 2023 and 7.7% in 2024, marking two straight years of decline. Analysts say rising macroeconomic risks, including high interest rates and inflation, have encouraged a more conservative approach, with workers choosing stability over aggressive job moves.
By industry, sectors centered on long-term projects or backed by strong domestic demand, such as trading companies (4.3%), telecommunications (4.8%), and steel (5.2%), showed lower turnover.
Industries that saw heavy talent outflows to IT and platform startups during the pandemic, including household goods (-6.7 percentage points), retail (-3.2 points), and services (-2.7 points), recorded the sharpest declines in turnover over the past three years. The slowdown in hiring across the platform sector and the bursting of the bubble appear to have increased retention at traditional offline companies instead.
By company, Doosan Enerbility posted the lowest turnover rate last year at 1.2%, followed by SK hynix and Samsung Life Insurance at 1.3% each.
In SK hynix's case, the company appears to have reduced the outflow of key talent by actively sharing the large gains it achieved from securing a lead in artificial intelligence (AI) high bandwidth memory (HBM) with employees.
S-Oil (2.4%), Samsung Electro-Mechanics (2.4%), and Samsung SDI (2.5%) also posted low turnover rates and ranked near the top. By contrast, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.'s global turnover rate stood at 10.1%, down from a year earlier but still in double digits.
bng@fnnews.com Kim Hee-sun Reporter