From 1924 with no strike, to job-based pay in 2001 and 2002

Founded in 1924, Samyang is placed as never having had a labor dispute, a conservative, long-lived firm that had once sat inside the top five groups in sugar and chemical fibers, then around the fiftieth rank. After the Asian financial crisis, Kim Yun, vice chairman from 2000, put the change on human resources, with Towers Watson, and brought in job-based pay for executives in 2001 and for all staff in 2002.

Pay would follow the job, not years or credentials. There was resistance; Kim allowed no exceptions and visited branches in Daegu, Yeosu, and Jeju to explain the system. Sales in 2002 were in the 800-billion-won range; a 2009 estimate is 1.4 trillion won. Those figures stay with 2002 and 2009.

Clearer jobs, a 2008 course in Daejeon, and 37 Future Leaders

Then about 1,300 people worked under some 500 job codes. Yang Jae-man, in HR, said people now knew why they were doing a job. Recruiting began to track who actually showed up; a medical-device unit weighted new sales, and is placed as having earned, for several years, around 25 percent operating profit in an African market. From year six, staff were moved into unlike work, and some later outgrew their first roles.

In 2008 about a hundred headquarters team leaders spent two weeks at a Daejeon training center, with a shorter follow-up in 2009. A Future Leader group, then 37 people in their fourth to thirteenth years, taught strategy in that course. Headcount, that group, and Kim Yun’s then-stated age stay with the essay’s framing. This page does not add later official sales, staffing, or labor-dispute figures. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Founded in 1924, Samyang Corp is placed as a representative long-lived Korean firm that had never had a labor dispute. Among listed Korean companies then said to have more than eighty years of history, the essay names, besides Samyang, only Doosan, Dongwha Pharm, and Yuhan. A conservative color had gone with that age. In the 1950s and 1960s, centered on sugar and chemical fibers, it had been inside the top five business groups; later it moved around the fiftieth rank, often read as the result of choosing stability over growth. The Asian financial crisis made a change feel urgent. Kim Yun, who became vice chairman in 2000 and is referred to as chairman, age fifty-six, in the essay’s then-current framing, put the axis of change on human resources. With Towers Watson he brought in, among the first Korean firms to do so, job-based performance pay, mentoring, and enterprise resource planning, plus leadership and communication strategy, leadership diagnosis and feedback, succession management, and surveys of culture, staff satisfaction, and engagement. Job-based pay began with executives in 2001 and was extended to all staff in 2002; the traditional promotion system then disappeared completely. After the crisis many Korean firms introduced performance bonuses but, fearing staff resistance, did not leave seniority pay, keeping a mixed seniority-plus-bonus system. Samyang made the shift from 2002, when even large firms still hesitated. Job-based pay values the job itself, not years of service (seniority pay) or a person’s credentials (ability pay); a decorated education and career can still earn less than someone in a higher-valued job. When it was first introduced there was much concern about how to weight jobs fairly, and about whether a performance-centered system would fit Korean culture. Samyang allowed no exceptions, so that the system itself would not collapse. Staff were at first bewildered and often unhappy. Kim Yun stressed the meaning of the new system at monthly meetings and whenever he had the chance, and, to ease resistance among production staff, visited not only headquarters but branches in Daegu, Yeosu, and Jeju, even when only a few people worked there, to explain the aim in person. Results are placed as appearing soon: sales in 2002 were in the 800-billion-won range; a 2009 figure is given as an estimate of 1.4 trillion won, described as double-digit average annual growth after the change. Those figures stay with 2002 and 2009; later official tallies are not added. Behind that growth the essay places a habit of giving people a chance at higher-level work, stirring a wish to develop, raising future leaders, and making talent rather than complaining that it is missing. Yang Jae-man, then a manager in the HR team, said the largest gain after job-based pay was that staff clearly knew why they had to do their work. Then about 1,300 people worked there, with some 500 job codes, grouped into around fifteen large categories for differential pay. A job-evaluation committee, built around people who knew the relevant jobs, scored about seven factors, including difficulty, and then set pay. Production grades: T1 to T4; office and administrative: P1 to P4; sales: P1 to P3; team-leader level: M1 to M2. In office work, P1 20 percent, P2 30 percent, P3 50 percent, with P4 for people on separate simple tasks. Inside the same P1 group, pay could differ by as much as about 50 percent. People could see the core tasks of their job and what would take them to the top of their group. In the past, for simple work, the key measure had been a supervisor’s satisfaction, a broad and hard-to-call-fair idea. Measurement also changed. A recruiter had once been judged by how many students from well-known Seoul universities applied; later the work used several years’ average applications, the current year’s applications, the share who actually filed, and the share of those accepted who showed up rather than leaving for another firm. Team-leader satisfaction was replaced by goals set together by the leader and the member. Yang said he was surprised to see recruiters, who had once thought it enough to visit a few famous Seoul campuses and hand out forms, now calling people who had passed to congratulate them, in order to raise application and start rates. A similar shift is placed in the medical-device unit, which sold surgical sutures. Many firms treat sales as the core sales measure, but sales can mean little: a plastics unit’s sales swung with the car industry. Samyang therefore made “new sales” a measure and gave it a large weight. The medical-device unit is then placed as having earned, for several years, a high operating profit around 25 percent in a difficult African market, with staff said to work harder knowing their pay was high. Yang said that even for qualitative work, if each unit brings its old measures — sometimes several hundred — and a few dozen that really contribute to results are chosen, measurement and comparison across units are possible. Under job-based pay a newcomer may not yet know where they will excel, so from the sixth year of employment Samyang, as far as possible, gave a person work almost unrelated to their past, on the thought that an ordinary person in department A might be an S-grade person in department B. One staff member who had done well for three or four years in workforce development, and had called that work a calling, was moved to sales at year six and did better still. Another, long in food sales, rich in food knowledge but older and said to lack planning skill, had refused a move; a planning team leader asked for him and trained him directly for four years; after that he was reassigned as a food-unit team leader. Yang argued that leaders often attend only to a few star people — three stars, four ordinary, three difficult, in a team of ten — and then complain that “we have no people” when one star leaves; not every team can hold stars, and someone who does not look like one may still have strong ability. The food-unit story, he said, is itself a carrot: even if I am not recognized now, I might later do that well. In 2008 Samyang first ran a team-leader capability course, meant to encourage innovation and a more flexible culture: about a hundred headquarters team leaders, in five groups of around twenty, were sent to the firm’s training center in Daejeon for two weeks of strategy, management accounting, performance management, and leadership, while authority was delegated to a senior member of the team. Many worried about twenty team leaders being away for two weeks; some did not go on the first day, uneasy about leaving Seoul for that long, not for a night or two. The vice president in charge phoned them and ordered them to Daejeon at once. Yang, who attended, had also worried; after two weeks he found the gap had been the best chance to raise the people under him, and that the firm ran without trouble even with dozens of team leaders away. Park Gwang-seo, then president at Towers Watson, which had advised Samyang, said other firms that introduced job-based pay did not match Samyang’s results, and that holding to principle mattered more than people think: if officers had allowed team leaders to skip the course, saying the team would not run without them, the members would not have felt, even for two weeks, what it was to sit in that chair. Team leaders who had left Seoul reluctantly began, through classes that ran each night until nine, to welcome the time away from daily burdens, and valued exchange with leaders from other units; many asked to be called again. In 2009 Samyang opened a two-night, three-day “level-up” course, reviewing how the 2008 teaching had been applied and what to add; the response grew still warmer. A Future Leader (FL) program managed people who had shown strong ability early, to give them a larger aim. It then held 37 people, selected from staff in their fourth to thirteenth years on performance, loyalty, and growth potential, given a completely different education and raised early as future leaders — a need, the essay says, especially in a long-lived, conservative firm, for innovation led by younger blood. They also taught in-house: in the first week of the two-week team-leader course, which leaned on strategic management, the in-house instructors were these Future Leaders, so members taught their managers, changing how each saw the other and raising effort on both sides. Headcount, the 37 Future Leaders, and Kim Yun’s age stay with the essay’s then-current framing. This page does not add later official sales, staffing, or labor-dispute figures.

Last updated: 14 November 2026