A 21 August board meeting set 2026 shareholder returns at ₩90–110tn, about 6–7% of market value and roughly three times what Samsung returned across 2024 and 2025 combined. The ₩15tn buyback approved the same day is earmarked for employee stock compensation, so those shares return to circulation rather than being retired.
Three Samsung filings, read together, show how a Korean capital-return story travels from newspaper to disclosure — and where the two part company.
On 24 June 2026 Munhwa Ilbo reported that Samsung would begin buying ₩90tn of its own stock the following month, in three annual tranches. Korean exchange rules require a listed company to answer a market rumour or press report on the record, and Samsung did: it was reviewing a buyback for employee stock compensation, but nothing on timing or size was decided. It refiled the same "undetermined" answer on 22 July and set its next re-disclosure date at 22 October 2026.
What the board actually approved on 21 August was ₩14,999,999,992,000 — ₩15tn, one sixth of the reported figure, over three months rather than three years.
Where a filing and a press report disagree, the filing is the record. Anyone who sized a position off the ₩90tn number in June was working from something the company had twice declined to confirm.
The 21 August filing states its purpose plainly: employee stock compensation. Samsung will buy about 53,285,968 shares on the open market between 24 August and 21 November, sized at that day's ₩281,500 close, through Samsung Securities, Shinhan and KB, with daily purchases capped at 7,321,653 shares.
Shares bought to pay employees are eventually handed to employees. They are not retired. For a holder, a buyback and a cancellation are different events, and Korean disclosure keeps them apart — the same filing's treasury table shows Samsung cancelled 73,359,314 shares since the start of this year, equal to 1.25% of the 5,846,278,608 shares outstanding. That is the line that permanently reduced the count. The ₩15tn is not.
Scale: ₩15tn is 1.0% of Samsung's ₩1,502tn market value and 0.91% of shares outstanding. Treasury holdings before the decision were 79,870,794 common shares, 1.4%.
The fair-disclosure filing of the same date is the larger commitment: 2026 shareholder returns of ₩90–110tn (~$64–79bn at an approximate ₩1,400/$). That is the residual of a January 2024 policy to return half of three-year free cash flow across 2024–2026, after ₩29.3tn already paid under it — ₩20.9tn in cash dividends and ₩8.4tn in buybacks and cancellations.
At the low end that is 6.0% of market value; at the high end 7.3%. It is about 3.1x what the previous two years delivered combined. Korean corporate capital return has historically been thin, and this is the policy being tested in public.
Sequencing: roughly ₩30tn of cash dividends in Q3 2026, with detail fixed at an end-October board meeting, and the remainder decided at a board meeting scheduled for late January 2027.
For the running rate, the quarterly dividend declared on 30 July was ₩374 a share, ₩2.456tn in total — 0.16% of market value, at a yield the filing itself puts at 0.1%. Dividends are not where this money is.
Samsung labels the ₩90–110tn forward-looking, varying with 2026 results, capex and cash flow. The free-cash-flow base excludes customer prepayments under memory long-term supply agreements and stock-compensation outlays — an exclusion that matters more than it sounds, because prepayments are large when memory is scarce.
The decision that determines whether the share count actually falls — how much of the remainder goes to cancellation rather than dividends — is explicitly deferred to late January 2027. Until then the ₩90–110tn is a size, not a structure.
Also unresolved: the 22 October re-disclosure promised in the July clarification had not been filed as of 26 August, and Samsung has not said whether August's approval closes it out.