Inside the very screen you are reading this on, there are probably a few of them. Smaller than a fingernail, jet black, engraved inside with circuits as dense as the map of a city. Semiconductors. We have almost never seen one with our own eyes. They are in our phones, in our cars, in our refrigerators and data centers, but always hidden inside something else, rarely catching the light. The most widely used object in the world, and the least visible.
In carrying this series to this point, I have passed four kinds of wall. A wall built by law, a wall built by nature, a wall built by habit, and a wall built tacitly by a few. The last wall is unlike any of them. Nobody built this wall on the company's behalf. It was not granted by the state, not shaped by the order of nature, not piled up by our habits. It was raised by sheer ability, by the force of technology and cost alone. And this wall can be climbed by only a handful of places in the world. Two of those places are in Korea. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix.
A Wall Even Money Cannot Climb
The companies that can properly make memory semiconductors — DRAM above all — number, in effect, three in the entire world. Samsung Electronics and SK hynix in Korea, and Micron in the United States. That short list has barely changed in more than a decade. In the earlier stories, the barrier to entry was law, or infrastructure, or habit. Here, the barrier is simply ability. And a wall of ability, strangely enough, is the hardest kind to climb with money.
Over the past several years, China has poured tens of trillions of won into semiconductors. You would think there is nothing a nation cannot do once it sets its mind to something, and yet memory is the one thing it cannot quite catch. The reason is this: the wall was built not with money but with time. The technique of engraving circuits a few atoms thick without a single slip; the yield that decides how many out of a hundred come out whole; the decades of trial and error that raised that yield one generation at a time. These are not things a fat bank account can buy overnight. A wall built of bricks can be bought with money, but a wall built of time can only be climbed with time.
Which is why I think of this wall as the most legitimate of the five. Kangwon Land's wall carried the shadow of gambling, KT&G carried tobacco, and the three telecom companies carried the faintly unsettling business of tacit equilibrium. This wall is different. It fought the world head-on and won by making the thing better. A monopoly with nothing to apologize for. And for precisely that reason, this wall is more merciless than any that came before it.
The Year the Eternal Second Overtook the First
In 2025, something happened inside this wall that one rarely gets to see.
For a long time, the number one in this world was Samsung Electronics. SK hynix was always the second, following behind. To people who knew semiconductors, the order was as natural as the seasons. Then, in 2025, the order flipped. SK hynix's operating profit for the year came to 47.2 trillion won — more than the 43.6 trillion won earned by the whole of Samsung Electronics. More than all of Samsung put together, smartphones and appliances and everything else, hynix, standing on memory alone, kept more.
| Company (2025, consolidated) | Revenue | Operating profit | 2025 in one line |
|---|
| Samsung Electronics | 333.6059 trillion won | 43.6011 trillion won | Record revenue, driven by semiconductors (DS) |
| SK hynix | 97.1467 trillion won | 47.2063 trillion won | No. 1 in Korea by operating profit, on HBM |
What produced this reversal. The answer takes three letters: HBM. As artificial intelligence exploded, demand shot skyward for this special kind of memory, stacked layer upon layer onto Nvidia's AI chips. And the company that made HBM first, and best, was the eternal second, SK hynix. Samsung was a step late. They stood inside the same wall, but the one who reached the top of the newly raised wall first was hynix.
Not that Samsung Electronics has collapsed, of course. Its 2025 revenue of 333 trillion won was the largest in its history, and by catching up on HBM late it pulled its semiconductor results back up. Measured by revenue alone, Samsung remains a giant more than three times hynix's size. But the fact that the old order was overturned, for the first time, on the single line called operating profit says a great deal about this wall. The wall of technology is the most legitimate of them all, but being inside it protects no one's rank. This wall must be rebuilt every generation, and if you slacken for one generation, you hand your place to yesterday's second. The wall hardest to climb from the outside is also the wall where, on the inside, the order changes most often.
Even the Paychecks Flipped
It was not only operating profit that flipped. The same thing happened to the money employees take home.
| Company | Employees | Average annual pay | Average tenure | Revenue per employee | Operating profit per employee |
|---|
| Samsung Electronics | 128,881 (domestic) | approx. 158 million won | 13.7 years | approx. 2.59 billion won | approx. 340 million won |
| SK hynix | 34,549 | approx. 185 million won | 13.4 years | approx. 2.81 billion won | approx. 1.37 billion won |
Per-employee figures are rough estimates, consolidated results ÷ domestic headcount (overseas subsidiary staff not included).
As recently as 2024, Samsung Electronics led on average pay. But when the record results HBM produced came back around as bonuses, SK hynix's average pay overtook Samsung Electronics' in 2025. As it went with the companies' operating profit, so it went with the employees' wallets: the long-standing order flipped. Inside the wall of technology, whoever reaches the top of the wall first takes everything. The rank, the profit, and the paycheck too. And the 1.37 billion won that a single hynix employee leaves behind in a year is a higher density than any company in this series.
We have come to the fifth wall. Walls raised by law, by nature, by habit, by equilibrium, and by time. Laying these five walls side by side and looking back over them is something I mean to save for the very end of this journey. There are still places left to visit. Having seen the highest wall, this time we go down to the lowest place. Our dinner table. In a packet of coffee and a can of tuna, in the morning's bread and the evening's soju, walls are standing there too.
This piece is part of the "Korea Value Chain" series and is an original work. It is an analysis based on public data and industry sources; some figures and assessments are estimates. It is not intended as a direct basis for investment decisions.
By Alexandro Lee · July 2026
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