Samsung Electronics is set to unveil a shareholder return package worth up to $79 billion at its board meeting this Friday.

The board is scheduled to meet around 4 pm local time, with details expected soon after.

People familiar with the matter say the package will likely fall somewhere between 90 trillion won and 110 trillion won, which works out to roughly $79 billion at current exchange rates.

Japan’s Nikkei newspaper had separately reported the figure could land closer to $72 billion, so the exact number may shift once Samsung confirms it.

Either way, it would rank among the largest capital return programmes the company has ever announced. This didn’t come out of nowhere.

Rival chipmaker SK Hynix recently rolled out a 40 trillion won buyback plan of its own, and that put pressure on Samsung to follow suit.

Both companies have benefited heavily from surging global demand for AI related memory chips, and investors have been pushing Samsung to share more of that windfall rather than let its cash reserves keep piling up.

The pressure hasn’t come only from institutional investors. A shareholder advocacy group, the Korea Shareholders Movement Headquarters, held a rally the same week demanding that Samsung cancel treasury shares set aside for employee bonuses and instead direct that value back to shareholders.

The group has asked Samsung to return more than half of its current cash holdings, pointing out that its shareholder return ratio still trails well behind global peers such as Nvidia, Qualcomm and Micron, all of which have expanded their own buyback and dividend programmes recently.

The scale of what’s coming is significant either way. Samsung is expected to post around 380 trillion won, or about $275 billion, in operating profit this year, with annual free cash flow estimated near 263 trillion won.

Exactly how the new package splits between dividends and buybacks, and over what time frame, is what the market will be watching for once Friday’s board meeting wraps up.

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