Samsung fires 3% of its employees from chip division in the US

Last updated: March 13th, 2023 at 15:35 UTC+01:00

The tech world is going through an economic tsunami. There are layoffs going on in major tech companies across the world, where employees are fired left, right, and center. Samsung, the big tech giant from Korea, joins this list and has fired around 3% of the employees at its US semiconductor subsidiary.

According to BusinessKorea, Samsung’s US chip subsidiary, Device Solutions Americas (DSA), has laid off 3% of its total employees. As per internal sources, Samsung DSA notified all outgoing employees about lay-offs, citing ‘uncertain economic conditions.’ The total number of employees at Samsung DSA is 1,200, of which 30 employees (3%) have been fired.

This move is in line with the economic downturn in the semiconductor industry after the decline in demand. In the previous quarter, i.e., Q4 of 2022, Samsung recorded $204 million in operating profit in the semiconductor division. If we compare this with the numbers of Q4 2021, the profit declined by a staggering 96.9%, which is speculated to decline in the current quarter as well.

Samsung isn’t the only semiconductor company that has taken this path of layoffs. Intel logged sales of $14 billion and an operating loss of $700 million in Q4 2022, which was its worst business performance in the last 50 years. To compensate for this to some extent, the company started laying off thousands of employees in Q1 2023.