• ASML’s €20,000 stock grant is the latest move in a semiconductor talent retention contest that has already reshaped pay in South Korea.
• Southeast Asia is short of the same engineers, without the profit pools to buy its way out.

Semiconductor talent retention has become one of the industry’s biggest line items, and ASML has just added to it. The Dutch lithography maker confirmed on Monday that it intends to offer employees a conditional stock grant of €20,000 (US$22,838) if they remain with the company from 2027 to 2030.

The company confirmed the plan in an emailed statement after regional Dutch newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad first reported it. The grant date is set for January 1, 2027, and the shares vest only if the employee is still at ASML on January 1, 2030. ASML said the terms are still being finalised, but that the grant would be offered to “all eligible employees.”

The company has not said what “eligible” covers, so the total cost is unclear. What can be said is that ASML employed more than 44,000 people at the end of 2024, which puts the scale of the commitment in the hundreds of millions of euros.

The timing is not accidental. ASML reported net income of €2.92 billion this month and said its flagship line of circuitry-printing tools is close to being sold out through 2027. It is Europe’s most valuable listed company. It is also, on current order books, a company that cannot afford to lose the engineers who install, service and improve those machines.

What South Korea already did

ASML’s move isn’t unprecedented. The template was set in Seoul in September 2025, whereby SK Hynix and its labour union agreed a deal that scrapped the ceiling on profit-sharing payouts, previously capped at 1,000% of base salary, and instead committed 10% of annual operating profit to an employee bonus pool. The agreement covered 33,625 employees, came with a 6% wage increase, and Bloomberg reported at the time that it would cost the company roughly 3.8 trillion won (US$2.7 billion). 

In February this year, the first payout under the revised framework landed at 2,964% of base salary, according to industry officials cited by KED Global. Samsung Electronics spent the following months trying to match it. Its semiconductor union threatened an 18-day walkout before workers ratified a 10-year agreement on May 27, allocating 10.5% of the chip division’s operating profit as stock-based bonuses plus a further 1.5% in cash. 

Bloomberg calculations put the average at around US$340,000 per chip division employee for 2026. The union had asked for 15%. The pressure that produced that deal was not abstract. Choi Seung-ho, chair of the Samsung Electronics Supra-Enterprise Union, said publicly that more than 200 Samsung engineers left for SK Hynix in the four months to February 2026.

The payouts are now large enough to register in national economic data. The Bank of Korea found that special pay in the IT sector rose 60.6% year-on-year in the first quarter, against wage growth of 2.1% elsewhere in the economy.

TSMC sits outside this pattern for a structural reason: it has operated without a labour union since it was founded in 1987, which leaves its employees no formal mechanism to negotiate a share of record profits. Reports of a possible reduction in its payout ratio this year have prompted talk of organising, though nothing has been confirmed by the company.

The semiconductor talent retention gap in Southeast Asia

Malaysia is competing for the same people, at a different tier of the supply chain and with none of these balance sheets. The government has said the industry needs 50,000 skilled engineers. Malaysian universities produce roughly 5,000 engineering graduates a year. Malaysia Semiconductor Industry Association president Wong Siew Hai has put annual talent loss to other markets at about 15%. 

Under the National Semiconductor Strategy, RM1.2 billion has been allocated to train and upskill 60,000 high-skilled engineers over five years. The distinction that gets lost is which tier is actually short. About a month ago, on June 14, job seekers began queuing outside a hotel in Melaka before 5 am for 500 production operator and technician roles at Infineon Technologies, with starting pay of RM3,500 against a minimum wage of RM1,700. More than 1,000 people turned up, according to The Edge Malaysia. 

There is no shortage of applicants at that level. The shortage is in wafer process engineering, IC design and advanced packaging, and those are precisely the people Singapore, Taiwan, the United States and Europe are recruiting. That is the uncomfortable part of ASML’s announcement for the region. 

Retention grants of this size do not create engineers. They redistribute a finite pool towards whoever is having the best year, and in 2026 that is a short list of companies at the top of the AI supply chain. For everyone below them, semiconductor talent retention is not a compensation strategy. It is a hiring problem that someone else’s bonus scheme keeps making worse.

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