Samsung tells executives to work 6-day weeks after reporting worst bottom line in over 10 years

Samsung ordered its executives to report to the office six days per week after the company posted its worst earnings in more than a decade.

The South Korean tech giant — which makes memory chips, smartphones and televisions — extended the workweek for top brass in order to “inject a sense of crisis” among its workforce, according to The Korea Economic Daily, which first reported the story.

“Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome this crisis,” a Samsung Group executive told the Korean outlet.

Executives can reportedly choose whether their sixth day of work takes place on Saturday or Sunday as the company enters into an “emergency mode” in the face of slumping profits, blamed partly on the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine as well as in the Middle East.

Those geopolitical tensions have put stress on economic factors like borrowing costs and oil prices, which had a hand in Samsung’s poor performance in its latest quarter, when net profit fell 73% in the three-month period ended Dec. 31.

For the full year, Samsung’s operating profit plunged 85% last year, to $4.7 billion — its weakest year since 2009 — and net profit dropped a similarly staggering 72% to $11.24 billion, the lowest since 2011, The Wall Street Journal earlier reported.

Samsung’s semiconductor business — which accounts for about 80% of its earnings — recorded a loss of nearly $11 billion last year.

Many Samsung executives have already been reporting to the office six days per week as of January, according to The Korea Economic Daily — and many other Korean conglomerates are expected to follow suit in the coming months.

Employees below the executive level won’t be expected to ramp up their workweeks any further, per the outlet.

Samsung is set to report its next quarterly earnings on April 30.

It appears that the company has already begun to reverse it fortunes, overtaking Apple as the top phone maker in the first three months of the year, according to the latest data from research firm IDC.

Apple, which had leapfrogged Samsung last quarter, shipped 50.1 million iPhones in the first three months of 2024 — a 9.6% year-over-year drop, IDC reported early this week.

Samsung, meanwhile, which makes the Android-based Galaxy, delivered 60.1 million smartphones in the first quarter — 0.7% less than the year-ago period.

Nevertheless, the company now has a 20.8% market share of all smartphone sales, topping Apple’s 17.3% share.

In the US, meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been championing for lawmakers in Congress to cut back on their working hours while getting the same pay.

The self-described “Democratic socialist” passionately advocated for a 32-hour workweek as the national standard while chairing a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing last month.

“American workers are now over 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s,” noted the 82-year-old Sanders before unveiling the “Thirty-Two Hour Work Week Act” — and insisting it’s “not a radical idea.”

“Almost all of the economic gains of that technological transformation have gone straight to the top, while wages for workers have remained stagnant or even worse,” he added.

The bill would pare the length of the standard working week over the course of four years, while reducing the threshold for overtime compensation at time and a half to workdays that last longer than eight hours and double pay for shifts of more than 12 hours.