Chip manufacturers changed production to meet demand
The automotive industry faces semiconductor shortages through 2022. Alan Priestley of the analysis firm Gartner forecasts an easing in the memory chip sector from 2023 to 2024. All other sectors will recover at different rates as the reasons vary.
Only a few alternatives
The reasons are the effects of the Corona virus on the one hand and digitization on the other. At the beginning of the pandemic, demand in the automotive industry shrank. Consequently, demand from chip manufacturers also declined, as companies in the automotive sector do not carry high inventories. Priestley explains, “After the market started to recover later in the year, they wanted to buy more chips again – but manufacturers have since shifted capacity to other high-demand products.”
In addition to the problem of supply shortages, fallback options to switch to other semiconductors are few and far between. Precise semiconductor configurations for today’s models had to be fixed several years ago. Priestley points out, “The scope for switching to alternatives is correspondingly narrow.”
Smartphone sector has the competitive edge
To that end, the smartphone competition has the advantage, as they chip hundreds of millions of devices, while the automotive sector only must supply tens of millions of vehicles. An additional problem is the suddenly high demand for notebooks, due to the increased occurrence of home offices. This has resulted in more demand for simple semiconductors, which is why chip plants are running at full capacity. The production of these chips had slowed down in the past few years, which is why it took longer to resume the production process.
Source: www.kloepfel-consulting.com