SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of
dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and
flash memory chips. Hynix is the world's second-largest memory chipmaker (after
Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (, sometimes shortened to SEC and stylized as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean multinational corporation, multinational electronics corporation headquartered in Yeongtong-gu, Suwon, South Korea. It is the pinnacle of ...
)
and the world's third-largest semiconductor company.
Founded as Hyundai Electronic Industrial Co., Ltd. in 1983
and known as Hyundai Electronics, the company has manufacturing sites in Korea, the United States, mainland China and
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...
. In 2012, when
SK Telecom
SK Telecom Co., Ltd. ( or ) is a South Korean wireless telecommunications operator and former film distributor and is part of the SK Group, one of the country's largest chaebols. It leads the local market with 50.5 percent share as of 2008. ...
became its major shareholder, Hynix merged with
SK Group
SK Group ( Korean: SK그룹, 에스케이그룹) is the second largest South Korean chaebol behind Samsung Group. SK Group is composed of 186 subsidiaries and affiliates that share the SK brand name and the group's management culture, named SKMS ...
(the third largest conglomerate in South Korea).
The company's major customers include
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
,
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
,
Asus,
Dell
Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies.
Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...
,
MSI,
HP Inc.
HP Inc. is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that develops personal computers (PCs), printers and related supplies, as well as 3D printing solutions.
It was formed on Novembe ...
, and
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) is an American multinational information technology company based in Spring, Texas, United States.
HPE was founded on November 1, 2015, in Palo Alto, California, as part of the splitting of the ...
(formerly
Hewlett-Packard).
Other products that use Hynix memory include
DVD player
A DVD player is a device that plays DVDs produced under both the DVD-Video and DVD-Audio technical standards, two different and incompatible standards. Some DVD players will also play audio CDs. DVD players are connected to a television to ...
s,
cellular phone
A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while ...
s,
set-top box
A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...
es,
personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in partic ...
s, networking equipment, and
hard disk drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...
s.
History
* 1949: Founded as Gukdo construction.
* 1983: Incorporated and renamed as Hyundai Electronics Industries Co., Ltd.
* 1985: Started mass production of 256K DRAM under a licensing agreement with U.S company
Vitelic Corporation.
* 1986: The Hyundai-manufactured
Blue Chip PC
Blue Chip Electronics, Inc., later Blue Chip International was an American computer company founded by John Rossi in 1982. Founded to develop peripherals for Commodore home computers, the company in 1986 began selling low-cost IBM PC compatibles.
...
was sold in discount and toy stores throughout the US. It is one of the earliest PC clones marketed toward consumers instead of business
* 1993: Took over
Maxtor (US HDD main factory)
* 1996: Initial public offering on the Korea Stock Exchange
* 1999: Merged with LG Semiconductor Co., Ltd (founded in 1979), then a division of
LG Electronics
LG Electronics Inc. () is a South Korean multinational electronics company headquartered in Yeouido-dong, Seoul, South Korea. LG Electronics is a part of LG Corporation, the fourth largest '' chaebol'' in South Korea, and often considered a ...
.
* 2000: Spun off Hyundai Image Quest, Hyundai Autonet and
Hyundai Calibration & Certification Technologies
HCT Co., Ltd. is a South Korean compliance testing and equipment calibration company that also develops particle counters and antennas. Founded in 2000 as Hyundai Calibration & Certification Technologies Co., the company is a spin-off from Hyu ...
* 2001: Changed the company name to Hynix Semiconductor Inc.
(from Hyundai Electronics); spun off Hyundai Syscomm, Hyundai CuriTel, and Hyundai Networks; completed spin-off from
Hyundai Group
* 2002: Sold HYDIS, TFT-LCD Business Unit
* 2004: Signed System IC Business Transfer Agreement with System Semiconductor
* 2005: Emerged from Corporate Restructuring Promotion Act ahead of schedule. Fined US$185M for involvement in
DRAM price fixing
In 2002, the United States Department of Justice, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, began a probe into the activities of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) manufacturers in response to claims by US computer makers, including Dell and Gateway, t ...
cartel
* 2006: Posted record the highest revenues since foundation
Established global manufacturing network with complete construction of Hynix-ST Semiconductor Inc.
Hynix's wholly owned manufacturing subsidiary in China
* 2007: Appointed Jong-Kap Kim as the new Chairman & CEO
* 2009: Company put up for sale by its lenders after it defaulted on loans and a subsequent debt-equity swap
* 2010: Fine of €51.47 million for illegally
fixing prices with eight other memory chip makers.
In January 2010, Hynix Semiconductor Inc was put up for sale in an auction valued at close to $3 billion.
On 31 August 2010, HP announced collaboration with Hynix to bring
memristor
A memristor (; a portmanteau of ''memory resistor'') is a non-linear two-terminal electrical component relating electric charge and magnetic flux linkage. It was described and named in 1971 by Leon Chua, completing a theoretical quartet of fu ...
to high volume manufacturing step (targeted for 2013).
* 2012:
SK Group
SK Group ( Korean: SK그룹, 에스케이그룹) is the second largest South Korean chaebol behind Samsung Group. SK Group is composed of 186 subsidiaries and affiliates that share the SK brand name and the group's management culture, named SKMS ...
, the third-largest conglomerate in South Korea, acquired a 21.05% stake in Hynix.
* 2013: Fab 1 and Fab 2 in China both suffered a massive fire which took the factories offline temporarily.
* 2014: SK hynix acquired the firmware division of
Softeq Development FLLC to make it part of its global R&D network alongside Italy-based Ideaflash S.r.l, Link_A_Media Devices and Violin Memory in the US, and Taiwanese Innostor Technology.
* 2020: Hynix announced agreement to purchase
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...
's NAND business for $9 billion, which closed in 2021. This spinoff created a new company, Solidigm, fully owned by SK Hynix.
Products
![Hynix HYMD564M646A6-JAA 512MB DDR 333MHZ CL2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Hynix_HYMD564M646A6-JAA_512MB_DDR_333MHZ_CL2.5-2769.jpg)
Hynix produces a variety of semiconductor memories, including:
* Computing memory
* Consumer and network memory
* Graphics memory
* Mobile memory
*
NAND flash
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use ...
*
CMOS image sensors
*
Solid-state drive
A solid-state drive (SSD) is a solid-state storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies to store data persistently, typically using flash memory, and functioning as secondary storage in the hierarchy of computer storage. It is a ...
s (SSDs)
Treatment of employees
Illegal pay-cut
According to SK Hynix's "Annual Salary Rules", the employment rules for office workers, employees are to be paid from 90% to 110% of the contract wage depending on their annual evaluation. However, a so-called "Self-Design" system was introduced in 2018, allowing managers to adjust each employee's salary. Under this system, differences in wages between departments and individuals can occur even if they receive the same evaluation. It is a zero-sum where the head of the organization distributes a limited budget to his employees. Under this wage system, only 60 percent of the annual salary is guaranteed. It has been reported that a majority of employees in a specific department received less than 90% of the contract salary.
In 2020, SK Hynix Labor Union submitted a petition to the Gyeonggi Provincial Labor Relations Commission and sent an official letter to the company. In response, the company held a briefing session on the "Self-Design" system and tried to ask the consent of employees. The briefing session and consent process has many procedural defects, which caused more controversy.
Deceptive revision of employment rules
When the above-mentioned pay-cut became controversial, SK Hynix held a briefing session to ask consent of the employees. It transpired that:
# They did not show the 'before and after' of the Employment Rules.
# They did not tell that it is a vote to decide whether the Employment Rules should be revised, thus most of the employees did not know that.
# Some directors and team leaders forced their employees to sign the agreement against each employee's free will.
# It was technically impossible to vote against the revision.
# Many employees realized that they were deceived and asked a retraction of their vote, but the HR department refused.
# Even though it was a briefing session, there was various tools such as screenshot prevention which implies that such a briefing session is not to be justified.
Workers who have been disadvantaged by wage cuts due to changes in the company's employment rules can later claim the amount of their lost wages to the company. In addition, according to the Supreme Court's ruling, even if the employment rules are changed later through due process, favorable contents in the previous labor contract shall prevail for workers who do not agree to change the employment rules.
2020 incentive bonus controversy
In January 2021, employees complained about the decision to pay a bonus of 20% of their annual salary. This is because performance-based bonuses were less than half of Samsung Electronics' peers. Samsung Electronics' sales and operating profit are far above SK Hynix's, so there is no reason to pay the same performance-based bonus simply because of its increased operating profit, but the amount of performance-based bonus has not changed at all compared to 19 years. Sales and operating profit increased by 18.2% and 84.3% compared to 19 years, but the scale of performance-based bonuses has been set due to the management's unilateral notification.
Due to the nature of the semiconductor industry, which is actively moving to the same industry, attracting manpower is important, but due to the reform of various wage systems, there has been a controversy over performance-based pay.
https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2021/02/02/business/industry/SK-hynix-Samsung-Electronics-bonus/20210202184613543.html]
See also
* List of semiconductor fabrication plants
This is a list of semiconductor fabrication plants. A semiconductor fabrication plant is where integrated circuits (ICs), also known as microchips, are manufactured. They are either operated by Integrated Device Manufacturers (IDMs) who design a ...
References
External links
*
SK Hynix Supplied AI Memories
{{Authority control
Anti-competitive practices
Companies listed on the Korea Exchange
Computer memory companies
Electronics companies established in 1983
Electronics companies of South Korea
Hyundai Group
Price fixing convictions
Semiconductor companies of South Korea
Hynix
SK hynix Inc. is a South Korean supplier of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips and flash memory chips. Hynix is the world's second-largest memory chipmaker (after Samsung Electronics) and the world's third-largest semiconductor company. ...
South Korean brands
South Korean companies established in 1983
Technology companies established in 1983
Technology companies of South Korea