SEOUL, Aug 24 (Reuters) – Shares of Samsung Electronics fell 8% in early trade on Monday, after the South Korean chipmaker said last week its shareholder returns this year could reach up to 110 trillion won ($79.4 billion).
Rival chipmaker SK Hynix was up 0.4%. The benchmark KOSPI index fell 1.5%.
Samsung said on Friday that this year’s shareholder returns would be over five times the size of the previous high of 20.3 trillion won in 2020, and that they would include 30 trillion won in cash dividends in the third quarter.
However, analysts said the projected returns were smaller than they had anticipated and that they had expected more details on the buyback plans.
“Unlike SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics did not mention the possibility of raising its existing shareholder return policy, nor did it announce a plan to cancel treasury shares that could more directly contribute to the stock price increase, which is disappointing,” Sohn In-joon, an analyst at Eugene Securities, said in a report.
“However, it is expected that gradual additional shareholder return announcements will meet market expectations.”
($1=1,385.7800 won)
(Reporting by Jihoon Lee and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Stephen Coates)
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