600 Employees Each Hit by a W10 Billion Windfall: The Company That Turned Ordinary Workers into Stock Millionaires

[Financial News] Riding the boom in the artificial intelligence (AI) chip market, about 600 employees at Japan's memory chip maker Kioxia Holdings, formerly Toshiba Memory, now hold assets worth more than 1 billion yen each, thanks to stock options.
According to Nikkei, Inc. on the 28th, Kioxia sold its semiconductor business in 2018 to a Korea-U.S.-Japan consortium led by Bain Capital. SK hynix also took part in the consortium.
After the acquisition, Bain Capital granted large stock options not only to executives but also to ordinary employees, including department heads and section managers. Private equity firms usually concentrate stock options on top management when they buy a company, but Bain Capital also gave frontline managers a chance to benefit.
Demand for memory chips used in AI has since surged, sending the company's value sharply higher. After its listing at the end of 2024, the stock price also soared. The initial stock options are now estimated to be worth about 790 billion yen. Based on that figure, the 600 employees each hold an average of more than 100 million yen in paper wealth.
The Nikkei described this as a new model of performance-based compensation in the AI era. It also reported that employees in the semiconductor divisions of Samsung Electronics and SK hynix in South Korea are expected to receive about 60 million won each this year through performance bonuses and special incentives. It also cited SpaceX as an example, where thousands of employees became millionaires through stock-based rewards tied to rising corporate value.
"The AI revolution is not only creating new industries, but also changing long-standing compensation systems over how the gains from corporate growth are shared and with whom," The Nikkei said.
gaa1003@fnnews.com An Ga-eul Reporter