Samsung Electronics' tax payments up 14.4% in 2020: report

Samsung Electronics Co. paid a total of 11.1 trillion won ($9.8 billion) in taxes and dues last year, up 14.4 percent from a year ago, its report showed Monday, with the majority going to its homeland.

The tech giant paid 8.1 trillion won, or 73 percent of its total tax bills, to the South Korean government in 2020, according to its 2021 sustainability report. The Americas and Europe followed with 14 percent and Asia with 11 percent.

South Korea collected 86 percent of Samsung's tax payments in 2018 and 68 percent in 2019.

Samsung, the world's largest memory chip and smartphone vendor, generated the most revenue in the Americas in 2020 with 78.3 trillion won, followed by Europe with 46 trillion won, China with 37.8 trillion won, Asia and Africa with 37.7 trillion won and South Korea with 37 trillion won.

The report showed Samsung had a total of 267,939 employees worldwide in 2020, down from 287,439 a year earlier. The number of workers in South Korea increased from 102,059 to 106,330, but employees in foreign countries dropped from 185,380 to 161,607.

Samsung said its welfare and benefit expenditure for its workers reached 4.65 trillion won in 2020, up 3.7 percent from a year earlier.

The company added its total green house gas emissions at its worksites stood at 14.8 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, up from 13.8 million tons a year earlier. (Yonhap)