Friday, October 1st, 2021
“Eleven million fewer new cars”
The slump in car production intensifies
The chip crisis in the auto industry is spreading. It hits the largest US automaker General Motors particularly hard. Consultants expect up to eleven million new cars worldwide, which therefore cannot be built – and do not expect a quick end.
According to estimates by management consultants, the loss of production in the global automotive industry due to the acute shortage of microchips and other electronic components is becoming ever greater. “We assume that ten to eleven million vehicles cannot be built this year,” said Albert Waas, partner at the management consultancy Boston Consulting, of “Welt am Sonntag”.
According to a report by “Spiegel”, the consulting firm PwC has seen a similarly high slump in car sales. She has calculated that up to eleven million fewer cars will be produced and sold worldwide by the end of the year than in the previous year. “The problems worsened in the third quarter and will continue well into next year,” said Felix Kuhnert, head of the automotive division at PwC, the magazine.
Only recently, the consulting firm Alix Partners estimated that the automotive industry would lose a total of 210 billion US dollars, around 179 billion euros, due to a lack of semiconductors. In May she had assumed a global loss of 110 billion dollars.
The largest US automaker General Motors was hit particularly hard by the chip supply bottlenecks in the past quarter. The GM sales in the home market fell year-on-year by almost a third to just under 447,000 vehicles, as the group announced.
Toyota, on the other hand, was even able to grow slightly and is well ahead of long-term market leader GM after the first nine months of the year. At the Japanese industry giant, US sales increased by 1.4 percent to a good 566,000 vehicles in the third quarter. After three quarters, Toyota now has just under 1.858 million vehicles – and GM is 1.777 million.
The current shortage of chips is particularly troubling for automakers around the world. As a result, various manufacturers had to suspend production in the past few months or were unable to complete vehicles. GM specifically pointed to bottlenecks in semiconductor production in Malaysia, but the situation is improving.
Other Japanese manufacturers did not do as well as Toyota in the US market. At Honda, sales fell by around eleven percent to just under 346,000 vehicles, and at Nissan by ten percent to around 199,000.