Up until a few weeks ago, Samsung still had some hope that it will manage to increase Exynos 2500 yields on time, but it is now faced with pressure from component production deadlines as it will release the Galaxy S25 in January, and it increasingly looks like only the Snapdragon processor will make it there.
There have been many times in recent years when I had to leave work unfinished and go home because of the 52-hour limit, even though a project deadline was approaching, Because of this, some key employees sometimes work off the clock, so their extra hours aren’t recorded by the company.
Samsung foundry engineer, November ’24
Needless to say, other Korean chip companies like SK Hynix have no issues with the “too short” of a workweek in the motherland, yet Samsung is far from the only big local company that complains that 52 hours a week is too short of a timeframe to complete all tasks.
Korean labor laws allow people to work for the standard 40 9-5 hours, then amass up to 12 hours overtime, and that’s that. Companies have been increasingly encouraging upper ranks to work more, though, asking middle managers to come six days a week sometimes.
As recently as 2018, the labor laws in South Korea allowed people to work 68 hours in a six-day workweek that was seen as pretty much standard. It seems hard for Samsung to shake those habits and fulfil its foundry projects on time with the new labor laws and the employee power on hand.
The Galaxy S25 series already got benchmarked both with an Exynos 2500 and a Snapdragon 8 Elite (Gen 4) processor, so the chipset design seems done. Samsung’s foundry, however, is still producing up to 70% discards, which is a rather unacceptable rate when it comes to supplying enough chips for the Galaxy S25 line that is likely to sell in the millions.
