FTI Consulting News Bytes – 29 May 2026

FTI Consulting News Bytes

We start this week’s edition by looking at Samsung’s landmark profit-sharing deal, where surging AI chip demand has driven record bonuses and intensified labour debates in South Korea, before moving to the EU’s decision to open mobile satellite spectrum bidding to non-European operators, including Starlink and Amazon, amid efforts to balance competition with technological sovereignty. We then turn to the UK, where Oxford Science Enterprises has warned that pension funds are still failing to keep pace with high-growth tech investment opportunities, despite policy efforts such as the Mansion House accord, followed by growing concerns in cybersecurity that advanced AI tools could soon rival even elite ethical hackers in vulnerability discovery. Finally, we finish with the UK government’s expected opposition to any further increase in Sunil Bharti Mittal’s stake in BT above 25%, highlighting further scrutiny of foreign ownership in critical national infrastructure.

This week’s news

Samsung staff set to cash in

The Financial Times reports that Samsung Electronics workers have approved a landmark profit-sharing deal that could hand employees in its memory chip division average bonuses of nearly $400,000. The ten-year agreement, which allocates 10.5% of the semiconductor division’s operating profit to bonuses, comes amid surging demand for AI memory chips that has sharply boosted Samsung’s earnings and lifted its market value past $1 trillion. While the deal ends months of negotiations and averts a threatened strike, it also throws into relief the widening gulf between Samsung’s chip business and its consumer electronics divisions, where bonuses are far smaller. According to the FT, comparable agreements at rivals such as SK Hynix are now intensifying a broader debate in South Korea over labour power, industrial competitiveness, and the inequality between unionised staff and subcontractors. That debate may only grow louder, as critics warn the deal could trigger a wave of similar profit-sharing demands across other major Korean companies.

Sky’s the limit for Starlink and Amazon

Reuters reports that the European Commission has ruled that non-European satellite operators, including Elon Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s low-earth-orbit business, will be allowed to bid for mobile satellite spectrum in the EU, even as Brussels moves to shrink the share available to foreign firms. Under the proposal, two-thirds of the available 2 GHz spectrum will be split equally between EU and non-EU operators for commercial use, while the remainder is reserved primarily for European players and the bloc’s own IRIS² satellite constellation. The decision comes amid a broader EU drive to bolster its technological sovereignty, fuelled by concerns over China’s rise and the dominance of U.S. tech giants at a moment of transatlantic strain. Reuters notes, however, that the push has exposed internal rifts at the Commission, with some officials favouring a more aggressive stance against foreign operators and others preferring a gradual approach. 

UK pension funds “way off the pace” in tech investment push

As reported by The Times, Ed Bussey, CEO of Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE), the University of Oxford’s spin-out fund, has said UK pension funds remain “way off the pace” in backing high-growth tech companies, despite years of government-led reform. His frustration centres on the slow progress of programmes such as the Mansion House accord, under which 17 pension firms agreed last summer to invest at least 10% of their funds in private markets by 2030. Bussey argued that the share of UK pension money flowing into the sector “needs to be dialled up about ten times,” citing a poor grasp of the opportunity and potential returns. He noted that most of the £300 million raised by OSE’s portfolio companies last year came from US rather than domestic investors, a pattern echoed across UK scale-ups, which draw up to 80% of their funding from overseas. His comments came as OSE’s annual report revealed a strong year, with net asset value up 17% to £1.26 billion on the back of two major exits, the $1.08 billion sale of Oxford Ionics to IonQ and the sale of Dark Blue Therapeutics to Amgen. Together returning more than £283 million to the fund, the deals are a sign of things to come, with Bussey expecting such realisations to become regular over the next two to four years.

AI raises the stakes for ethical hackers

According to the BBC, an award-winning ethical hacker known as “Chompie” has warned that advances in AI cybersecurity tools could soon outpace even top human researchers, potentially reshaping competitive hacking and “bug bounty” programmes. Speaking after winning major prizes at the Pwn2Own competition in Berlin, Valentina Palmiotti said AI systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos and other advanced models are already accelerating vulnerability discovery and may eventually eliminate much of the “lower-hanging fruit” currently exploited by human hackers. While she acknowledged that AI is currently a powerful productivity aid, she argued that within a few years, only elite researchers may remain competitive as automation takes on more of the discovery workload. Other experts at the event were more optimistic, suggesting AI will act as an “assistant” that enhances human intuition rather than replacing it, even as concerns grow that both ethical hackers and cyber criminals are entering a new AI-driven arms race in offensive and defensive security.

BT stake capped: UK draws a line at 25% for Mittal

The Financial Times reveals that the UK government is expected to oppose any attempt by Indian billionaire and Chairman of Bharti Enterprises, Sunil Bharti Mittal, to raise his stake in BT above the 25% threshold, on the grounds of maintaining sovereign control over critical national infrastructure. According to the outlet, Mittal’s Bharti Enterprises currently holds 24.95% of BT following its 2024 acquisition of a stake from Patrick Drahi, and any move above 25% would trigger a formal review under the National Security and Investment Act, which officials are likely to use to block further increases. While government figures stressed the stance is not specific to Bharti or India, they said it reflects a broader shift toward tighter scrutiny of foreign ownership in sensitive assets such as BT’s Openreach fibre network, which serves more than 22 million UK homes. The position is expected to constrain Mittal’s influence despite his close relationship with BT’s leadership and previous UK investments, including OneWeb and Airtel Africa-linked plans.

Top Tweets of the Week

• MP Kanishka Narayan, Minister for AI and Online Safety: “The UK and Australia have shared priorities. High amongst them: shaping technology in light of our shared values. Bright morning at @ukinaustralia in Canberra, to learn from Australia’s social media age limits, and to talk about AI that works for us all!”
• Mark Gurman, Managing Editor at Bloomberg: NEW: Apple is shaking up its hardware engineering ranks, changing its management of Product Design and expanding the roles of several key silicon and hardware leaders.
• Steven Levy, Editor at Large at WIRED: The recent AI agent breakthrough is just as big a bang as ChatGPT. Only techies realize this now but eventually no one will be able to ignore it. My report from inside this huge shift.

Number of the week

$150bn The amount that NVIDIA is planning to invest in Taiwan each year, terming it the “epicentre” of the AI revolution ‌and predicting it will be the world’s tech manufacturing hub for a long time (Reuters).