The Chinese manufacturer of household appliances Dreame Technology has announced unusual and at the same time generous incentives for employees by the end of 2025. In addition to the standard annual bonuses, the company will award all employees one gram of gold, and ten people will be awarded a trip to Antarctica.
Additional bonuses were announced by Dreame founder and CEO Yu Hao in a post on the social network WeChat. According to the CEO, every employee of the company will receive a golden reward, and a trip to Antarctica will be a separate form of encouragement for ten people.
According to journalists, the total value of the premium gold will be about 26 million yuan, or about 3.7 million US dollars. The calculation is based on the current retail price of gold of about 1,400 yuan per gram and the number of Dreame staff at about 18,500 people.
Judging by the actions of the company’s management, it decided to reward employees for good performance in the coming year. According to the results of the first three quarters of the year, Dreame became one of the five largest global manufacturers of robot vacuum cleaners.
Back in 2012, researchers made an unexpected discovery: gold was found in ice cores extracted from the subglacial Lake Vostok. The analysis of the samples revealed a high concentration of gold ions — 80%, which is comparable in content to gold bars of the 700th sample.
The peculiarity of the found gold lies in its physico‑chemical state: it is present as an aqueous solution at the molecular level. In this form, the metal lacks the characteristic metallic luster inherent in traditional gold alloys.
Nevertheless, the industrial extraction of gold from Lake Vostok is currently extremely difficult for a number of reasons: firstly, the gold is not in the form of placers or nuggets, but is dissolved in the aquatic environment; secondly, the reservoir is hidden under an ice shell more than a kilometer thick.
An additional limiting factor is the Madrid Protocol, signed in 1991. This international document imposes a ban on any activities related to the search, exploration and development of mineral resources in Antarctica.
By Oleg Kiryanov
