The shortage of semiconductors will still have a lasting effect on the automobile market. In any case, this is the analysis of Oliver Zipse, managing director of the German car manufacturer BMW, for whom the disruption of supply chains linked to the Covid-19 epidemic and the conflict in Ukraine should lead to further extension the phenomenon, which will continue to be a pebble in the shoe of the automotive industry at least until 2023.
For the leader, the worst is far from over. “We are still at the peak of the chip shortage,” he said in an interview, published Monday in the German press. It’s not about to stop. “I expect we will start to see improvements no later than next year, but we will still face a fundamental shortage in 2023,” he said, revising his previous estimates upwards. .
Same story on the side of Volkswagen. Asked about the issue this weekend, the automaker’s financial director, Arno Antlitz, made the same observation. According to him, even if the bottlenecks will probably start to be absorbed towards the end of this year, with a return to the pre-health crisis level as early as 2023, “the structural inadequacy of the supply” of semiconductors will last until 2024.
Major bottleneck
At the beginning of 2022, even before the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the American authorities had already predicted it: shortages of semiconductors will not ease in the next six months… at least. According to the results of a study published by the Biden administration, a “perfect storm” of factors explains this shortage, among which a new peak in demand caused by the health crisis, which combine with a drop in the productivity of actors. pandemic-related semiconductors. According to figures produced by the White House, demand for chips increased by 17% between 2019 and 2021.
However, this increase in demand has not been followed by an equivalent increase in supply, the median inventory times (the average time a chip will spend in a warehouse or on a shelf before being purchased by an end consumer) dropping from 40 days to less than 5 days over the same period. Add to that the conflict in Eastern Europe and you have a major bottleneck for the market.
This is despite data from US authorities that existing semiconductor fabs have been operating at more than 90% capacity since the second quarter of 2020 – an extremely high production figure for an industry that was below 80% in 2020. beginning of 2019. Specific chip categories suffering the most from the shortage include legacy logic chips (used in healthcare and automotive), analog chips (used in energy, image sensors and RF applications), as well as optoelectronic chips (used in various types of sensors and switches).