As the year draws to a close, numerous leading enterprises have successively signaled intentions to raise salaries and upgrade employee benefits. Companies such as ByteDance, JD.com, CATL, and BYD have coincidentally increased their compensation budgets and optimized year-end bonus structures. Unlike previous cycles, this wave of adjustments is not accompanied by large-scale recruitment expansion nor is it focused on short-term stimulus. Instead, it shows a greater inclination towards prioritizing "people": ByteDance and JD.com are making larger investments in year-end bonuses and salary adjustment budgets, while CATL and BYD have initiated new rounds of salary increases targeting different employee groups. Furthermore, some companies are directly distributing gold to employees beyond conventional year-end incentives, and others are extending their focus to longer-term dimensions such as housing, employee health, and family insurance. These signs collectively indicate that major tech firms are placing greater emphasis on fostering more stable relationships between employees and the organization. Against a backdrop where companies still widely emphasize efficiency and cost control, this choice is somewhat unusual. Yet, it itself serves as a signal: in a cycle of persistent uncertainty, companies are reassessing the value of "people," viewing them as a core asset requiring long-term cultivation.

The significant "salary increase" changes are not isolated incidents; within weeks, "salary surge" trends have been implemented across the technology, e-commerce, and new energy manufacturing sectors. Manufacturing and new energy companies were the first to report salary adjustment news. In early December 2025, online sources revealed that CATL had sent a salary adjustment notice via internal email, raising the basic monthly salary by 150 yuan for employees in grades 1-6. Concurrently, the company introduced a Spring Festival on-duty reward plan, where eligible employees could receive an additional subsidy of at least 3,200 yuan. This news quickly became a trending topic on Weibo and was later confirmed by CATL. Although the base increase of 150 yuan was criticized by netizens as being "too little" for a company like CATL, which "earns over 100 million yuan daily," such a universal raise is relatively uncommon for a manufacturing enterprise with over 130,000 employees and high cost sensitivity. In the same month, reports of salary increases for BYD's technical R&D personnel were also confirmed by media as accurate. It is understood that most adjustments were around 1,000 yuan, with some reaching 3,200 yuan and others varying by several hundred yuan.

Simultaneously, internet companies collectively announced incentive plans around the year-end period. On December 19, ByteDance announced to its global employees that it would continue to increase investment in talent: the 2025 bonus pool (including performance-based stock options) would be 35% higher than the previous cycle, salary adjustment investment would increase by 1.5 times, and the starting salary and ceiling for the total compensation package across all job levels would be raised concurrently. JD.com's 2025 year-end bonus was also notably "generous." Reports indicated that 92% of JD.com's employees received their full or even exceeded their year-end bonus targets, with the total year-end bonus investment increasing by over 70% year-on-year. In departments that had already upgraded to a 19-month salary structure, employees with an A+ performance rating could achieve 22 months' pay, some business units had already achieved 20 months' pay ahead of schedule, and procurement and sales positions averaged 25 months' pay with no upper limit.

Beyond conventional salaries and bonuses, some companies began introducing more symbolic incentive methods. In late December, Dreame Technology announced that, in addition to year-end bonuses, it would distribute an extra 1 gram of gold to all employees, covering approximately 18,500 staff. A few days later, it rolled out a "Family Health Security Plan," providing critical illness and cancer insurance for employees and their immediate family members, thereby extending the welfare scope from the individual employee to the family level. Platform companies are also increasing welfare investments for frontline workers. On December 12, JD.com announced it had already provided 28,000 sets of "Courier Homes" for its frontline staff and plans to invest an additional 220 billion yuan over the next five years to add 150,000 housing units. Previously, Meituan had launched "Rider Apartments" with a monthly rent of 700 yuan, including utilities, and stated it would invest 100 billion yuan over the next five years to build a rider support system. Although this "welfare competition" occurs amidst intense rivalry between the two companies, the fact that it benefits delivery personnel and couriers, groups often in a "welfare vacuum," has garnered considerable positive feedback. It's evident that companies' methods of incentivizing employees are expanding from the singular approach of "raising wages" to more multi-dimensional and comprehensive benefit packages.

Daring and having the capacity to implement large-scale salary increases is itself a demonstration of a company's operational confidence. Companies like JD.com, CATL, and BYD achieved reasonably good performance in 2025. Financial reports show that in the third quarter of 2025, CATL reported total revenue of 104.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12.9%, with net profit attributable to shareholders of 18.55 billion yuan, up 41.2% year-on-year. JD Group's Q3 revenue was 299.1 billion yuan, increasing 14.9% year-on-year. BYD's revenue for the first three quarters reached 566.266 billion yuan, a rise of 12.75% year-on-year. However, pressures are not entirely absent. JD Group faced "revenue growth without profit growth," and BYD, which heavily invests in R&D, experienced a rare quarterly revenue decline. Against this backdrop, the collective salary increases by these giants are clearly not merely simple employee benefits. These seemingly different human resource strategies are, in essence, "open cards" played by companies at their respective strategic inflection points to address pressing challenges.

In recent years, global competition in the power battery market has intensified. Amid pressures to both expand production capacity and ensure delivery, CATL precisely needs to secure its core workforce that supports large-scale manufacturing. By raising base salaries and offering key milestone rewards, it is effectively "reinforcing the foundation" of its manufacturing system to reduce the hidden costs associated with employee turnover. BYD, on the other hand, has ambitions for智能化 (intelligentization). After announcing plans to invest hundreds of billions in布局智能化 (intelligentization布局), and despite facing profit declines, it has not scaled back R&D investment; the targeted year-end incentives serve as a corresponding measure. With the internet traffic红利 (dividend) peaking in recent years, ByteDance, which is aggressively expanding in areas like advertising, e-commerce, and AI large models, is mitigating industry challenges by increasing talent investment. JD.com's large-scale operations in retail, logistics, and food delivery over the past two years, supported by significantly increased year-end bonuses and enhanced performance differentiation, also serve to improve supply chain and organizational efficiency. Therefore, the salary increases by these giants represent a targeted strategic investment oriented towards the future. Although their starting points differ, the common thread is viewing "people" as the investment with the highest compound interest currently and as part of the competitive moat.

Viewed from a broader perspective, the changes in this round of human capital investment also reflect a shift in the focus of corporate competition. Over the past decade, corporate expansion often relied on scale and capital investment, following a growth logic of "hiring more people, opening more stores, building more capacity." However, as market space becomes saturated, capital costs rise, and technological innovation hits bottlenecks, traditional scale advantages can no longer sustainably create marginal value. At this juncture, the scarcity of talent and organizational capability is magnified. Global trends also corroborate this shift. In recent years, from Silicon Valley AI firms to new energy manufacturing giants and domestic internet platform companies, all have been ramping up investment in core human resources, with R&D backbone staff, technical engineers, and frontline operations personnel becoming highly sought-after talents. Just recently, Great Wall Motors' decision to取消 "大小周" (the "big and small week" work schedule) sparked discussion, seen as a sign of receding involution in the automotive industry. In 2025, the domestic auto market exhibited a trend of "high sales volume, low growth." The industry believes that after moving beyond rough competition, technological innovation, product quality, and global布局 (layout) have become the core competencies. The implementation of a two-day weekend is seen as a marker of the industry's return to rationality, balancing employee life and work while enhancing organizational stability.

Echoing CATL's salary incentives for frontline workers and BYD's targeted raises for R&D personnel, these measures indicate that companies are no longer relying solely on "strength in numbers" but are seeking to enhance overall execution and collaborative efficiency through refined human capital management and organizational system design. This shift signifies a structural change in corporate evaluation systems: traditional metrics like operating scale, financing capability, or market share are being supplemented by longer-term, harder-to-quantify indicators such as organizational capability, talent moat, and execution stability. In other words, when the boundaries for external expansion are constrained, the key battlefield for corporate competition has extended from "competing on markets, capital, and technology" to "competing on organizational capability and talent management." Therefore, as corporate perspectives evolve, the future battlefield of competition will not lie solely in products and technology, but increasingly on "people." Perhaps this also means that this wave of salary increases is only the beginning.