South Korea's stock market soars as Samsung union calls off planned strike South Korea's stock market has rallied following a last-minute deal to avert a strike that had threatened to disrupt the global supply of memory chips. Samsung Electronics and its union on Wednesday night announced a tentative agreement to settle a months-long standoff over pay, avoiding a planned 18-day walkout by some 48,000 employees. South Korea's benchmark KOSPI on Thursday soared more than 8 percent, continuing a remarkable run that has seen the index rise more than 80 percent since the start of the year. Samsung Electronics, South Korea's biggest firm by market capitalisation, jumped more than 7.5 percent. SK Hynix, the main rival of Samsung Electronics in memory chips, surged more than 11 percent.

Google has announced a wave of fresh layoffs despite turning record profits - fueling concern that staff are being replaced by AI. The tech giant made roughly 1,000 employees redundant across its sales, hardware, and engineering teams last month, and confirmed'a few hundred were laid off of each team. Google reported that it made a 20.7 billion profit in the fourth quarter of 2023, an increase of 52 percent compared to the previous year, yet its workforce shrunk by four percent. Other major artificial intelligence investors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Discord, and eBay have also laid off tens of thousands of workers in the past 12 months. Staff are now pushing back against the layoffs, and Google software engineer Diane Hirsh Theriault wrote on LinkedIn that the'glassy-eyed leaders are trying to point in a vague direction (AI) while at the same time killing their golden goose.'