Hanmi Pharmaceutical Group founder and chairman Lim Sung-ki has found himself in the public spotlight since announcing plans to distribute a portion of his personal stocks, worth some 110 billion won ($92.5 million), as a gift of gratitude to all his employees.

The country’s largest drugmaker said Monday it is distributing 900,000 shares of the chairman’s common stocks in Hanmi Science, the holding company of Hanmi Pharma, to the entire workforce.

As a result, some 2,800 Hanmi employees at both companies will receive an average of 40 million won in stocks each, which amounts to around 1,000 percent of an employee’s average monthly wage. 

The bold move by the 66-year-old chairman comes after Hanmi hit multiple jackpots in 2015 -- striking seven mega export deals worth some 8 trillion won to transfer its self-developed new drug technologies to global pharmaceutical companies including Sanofi, Janssen, Eli Lily and Boehringer Ingelheim.

Thanks to the string of multitrillion-won deals, Hanmi Pharmaceutical and Hanmi Science were the top two performers on the local stock market in 2015.

Throughout the year, shares of the two companies skyrocketed every time a new licensing deal between Hanmi and a global pharma giant was sealed -- particularly after the Korean drugmaker struck two major deals with France’s Sanofi and U.S.-based Janssen in November 2015.

“For the past five years, Hanmi Pharmaceutical staff have endured difficult business conditions and pushed forward continued investment into R&D, despite deficits and stagnant paychecks,” Lim said.

“I feel immense gratitude for all our employees who have helped the company pull through hard times and hope that (this stock bonus) will act as a source of encouragement.”

The Hanmi chairman’s decision has prompted much positive feedback, particularly on social media, given it is extremely rare for the head of a listed Korean company to gift his personal stocks to employees.

Such a move has taken place only once, when Sungwoo Hitech chairman Lee Myung-keun distributed 1.83 million of his own shares, worth some 27.3 billion won at the time, to the company’s employees at the end of 2015, according to the KRX.

“Chairman Lim has singlehandedly diffused the popular conception that only the owners of big businesses in Korea are stock-rich,” wrote Naver blogger joonjump.

The scale of the chairman’s company-wide stock giveaway is drawing keen attention as well. The shares to be handed out account for some 23 percent of Lim’s total stocks in Hanmi Science, as well as 1.6 percent of all stocks issued by the company.

“Perhaps more significant than the scale of the stock distribution is the heightened loyalty and trust of the employees gained by the company,” the blogger said.

“Only if the owners of Korea’s conglomerates could emulate the Hanmi Pharmaceutical chairman, then ‘Hell Joseon’ would no longer exist,” posted one Twitter user, referring to the catchphrase recently used by Korean youth to describe the structural malaise of the national economy.

Over the course of 2015, chairman Lim, who had held around 20 million stocks in Hanmi Science, racked up around 2.67 trillion won in profits to become the most successful stockholder of the year in the local pharma sector.

By Sohn Ji-young (jys@heraldcorp.com)