SK Telecom, which suffered a hacking incident last year, also received the weakest marks on employee compensation metrics. Known as the pay king among carriers, SK Telecom's average salary growth rate last year was the only one among the three telecom companies to rise by just in the 1% range from 2024. By contrast, LG Uplus, which avoided the hacking headwind over the same period, posted a 7.34% raise, the largest pay increase among the three. Analysts say the aftershocks of the security incident may have affected employee compensation following its impact on earnings and shareholder returns.
On the 24th, ChosunBiz's analysis of last year's business reports by the three carriers showed SK Telecom's average salary per employee at 163 million won, rising only 1.24% from a year earlier. SK Telecom recorded an average salary increase of 5.92% in 2024, a sharp slowdown in just one year. Last year, KT's average salary per employee was 118 million won and LG Uplus's was 117 million won, up 7.27% and 7.34%, respectively, from 2024.
Of course, SK Telecom still dominates in absolute pay levels among the three carriers. The industry believes the hacking incident SK Telecom suffered in Apr. last year weighed on earnings and the expense structure, sharply reducing the company's room to raise wages. In fact, SK Telecom's operating profit last year plunged 41.1% from 2024. The company also halted cash dividends to shareholders in the third and fourth quarters last year.
KT, which experienced a small-payment hacking incident in Sep. last year, showed the opposite trend. KT's year-over-year average salary increase was just 2.8% in 2024, but jumped to 7.27% last year. This is seen as reflecting expense savings from large-scale restructuring carried out in 2024 and increased revenue in the real estate business institutional sector, which drove operating profit up 205% from a year earlier. Because the hacking incident broke in the fourth quarter last year and penalty fee waivers were granted in Jan. this year, the fallout was not fully reflected in KT's results last year. Some in the industry say that had KT not suffered the hacking incident, its earnings improvement would have been larger, and its average salary increase could have outpaced LG Uplus.
Even using the past two years as a baseline, LG Uplus had the steepest average salary increase. For LG Uplus, the year-over-year average salary increase per employee was 7.9% in 2024 and 7.3% in 2025, totaling 15.8% over two years. Compared with KT's average salary increases of 2.8% in 2024 and 7.3% in 2025, totaling 10.3% over two years, this is a higher figure. It is also higher than SK Telecom's average salary increases of 5.92% in 2024 and 1.24% in 2025, totaling 7.24% over two years.
In the telecom industry, there is a view that it has been confirmed that security incidents affect not only one-off expenses but also earnings, dividends, and wage policies in a chain reaction. Whether a company avoided the hacking headwind or not appears to have made a difference in how employees feel about compensation. An Jeong-sang, an adjunct professor at Chung-Ang University's Graduate School of Communication, said, "Security incidents do not stop at damaging a company's image; they shake the overall expense structure," and added, "In the end, they can act as a pressure factor on internal compensation systems such as labor cost management or wage growth rates."