The global shortage of semiconductor chips is affecting the automotive industry, and some vehicles cannot be produced. Porsche uses a creative trick: instead of stopping production, they install non-functional dummy chips.
“We manage our production programs every day with great effort and creativity and can use it to cushion something – for example we produce vehicles with so-called dummy chips,” said Porsche boss Oliver Blume of the “Stuttgarter Zeitung” and the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” on Friday. “As soon as the real chips are available, we will retrofit these vehicles.”
It is about a low five-digit number of vehicles. Porsche is “literally making a virtue out of necessity,” explained Blume. “We always make sure that our customers don’t have to wait too long.” Porsche has “a certain priority” within the Volkswagen Group because of its profitable models, Blume told the newspapers. In the second half of the year, the company wants to catch up on the weekends. “But that also depends on the semiconductor availability.”
Porsche writes record numbers
The sports car manufacturer is on record course despite the semiconductor shortage and the corona crisis. In the first half of the year, Porsche achieved an operating profit of 2.8 billion euros and a return on sales of around 17 percent. “This is a half-year result that we reported in 2014 as a full-year result,” said Blume. He cites the product strategy as the reason for the success. One example is the fully electric Taycan. “In the first half of the year, we were able to deliver almost 20,000 Taycans – which means that the volume of the entire previous year has practically already been reached.”
Volkswagen suffers from a lack of semiconductors
At Volkswagen, due to the bottlenecks in important semiconductors, the big end is apparently only just around the corner. After the supply of electronic components had recently relaxed, the situation is now deteriorating again: The main brand VW expects a “very challenging” third quarter with a view to the supply of computer chips, as the German carmaker announced on Friday when it published its half-year figures.
This is mainly due to the fact that the supply bottlenecks have now shifted to Southeast Asia, where production stoppages have occurred in several countries with important locations for the semiconductor industry due to the newly flaring pandemic. The VW sister company Audi also expects a critical supply situation for the important components in the coming months.
The multi-brand group was unable to produce a high six-digit number of vehicles in the first half of the year due to the lack of chips.