From Near-Strike to HBM4E Shipments: Samsung’s Pivotal Week in Chips

Samsung's stock soars 174% YTD as it averts a factory strike with record bonuses, ships HBM4E samples to challenge SK Hynix, and lands Anthropic as a foundry partner.

Samsung Electronics has navigated a remarkable 72-hour stretch that encapsulated both the promise and the peril of its current trajectory. The South Korean giant’s shares have surged roughly 174% to 178% year-to-date, touching a 52-week high of 370,000 KRW just two days ago, before easing to 351,500 KRW on Thursday as profit-taking pared 2.5% from the stock. Yet behind that headline rally, the company faced a labor showdown that came within 90 minutes of shutting down its critical memory-chip factories.

A strike that would have halted production at Samsung’s most profit-heavy plants was averted late on June 3 when management and the National Samsung Union reached a last-minute deal on a new bonus structure. Some 62,600 employees voted on the accord, with 73.7% backing it. The agreement ties payouts to 2026 operating profit and delivers a windfall for memory-chip workers: an average bonus of 513 million KRW, or roughly $340,000, more than triple the 158 million KRW they received the previous year.

The generosity, however, highlights an internal imbalance that is stirring discontent. The semiconductor division generates nearly 94% of Samsung’s operating profit, and other units receive far less. Non-memory chip employees will get 200 million KRW, while the Device eXperience (DX) division – which covers smartphones and appliances – gets an even smaller payout. Reports indicate that workers outside the chip business are already leaving the main union for alternative groups, potentially complicating future negotiations.

While the labor front was cooling, Samsung’s technology arms were racing ahead. On the same day the strike was averted, the company confirmed it had shipped samples of its 12-layer HBM4E memory chips to key customers. The move is aimed squarely at reclaiming market share from SK Hynix, which dominated the premium high-bandwidth memory segment with a 57% share in the fourth quarter of 2025, compared with Samsung’s 22% and Micron’s 21%. If Samsung can qualify these HBM4E chips, its massive production capacity could reshuffle the pecking order overnight.

Further signaling its ambitions, Samsung unveiled an HBM5 prototype at Computex on June 2, targeting a bandwidth of 4 terabytes per second – double that of HBM4E. The chip is designed for Nvidia’s future “Feynman” architecture, which will succeed the Vera Rubin platform, though mass production is not expected before 2028 or 2029.

The foundry business is also gaining traction beyond memory. Anthropic, the AI company recently valued at nearly $1 trillion in its latest funding round, named Samsung as a strategic infrastructure partner, explicitly citing its logic-chip capabilities. That endorsement sets Samsung apart from Micron and SK Hynix, which were also listed as partners but without the same emphasis on advanced logic. The relationship builds on an existing multibillion-dollar supply deal with Tesla signed last year, and analysts see it as a door-opener for more contract manufacturing wins.

Separately, Samsung’s foundry arm is in advanced talks with Chinese automaker BYD to produce system-on-chip solutions for autonomous driving using 2nm and 4nm technologies. Chinese rival SMIC lacks the capacity for such advanced nodes, giving Samsung an opening. The company already supplies 5nm chips to other regional automakers.

On the production front, Samsung confirmed during its SAFE Forum 2026 that it has successfully integrated EDA tools from Synopsys and Cadence for its 2nm process, a prerequisite for winning high-performance computing and automotive orders. The focus now is on scaling that manufacturing line, even as the company begins shipping HBM4E samples and prepares for the next generation.

For now, the stock’s technical picture suggests caution. The relative strength index stands at 73.2, firmly in overbought territory, while the 30-day annualized volatility of 71.7% reflects the dramatic swings that have accompanied the rally. With labor peace secured and new chip samples in customers’ hands, the market’s attention turns to whether Samsung can convert its technological momentum into sustained market share gains – and whether the rising cost of keeping its workforce happy will dent margins along the way.