Although the problem of lack of cores that swept the world in 2020 shows signs of relief in 2022, the "lack of cores" in the automotive market remains. Under the "core shortage", where will car companies go?

01 car companies "lack of core" status quo: shutdown, reduce production, reduce the distribution...

Affected by the shortage of chips, global car companies face pressure to reduce production, stop production, order delivery time extension.

Recently car manufacturer Stellantis announced that its Rennes-La Janais Citroen plant in Brittany, France, stopped production on July 3 due to a shortage of chips. In addition, Stellantis also suspended production at its Melfi assembly plant in Italy, which produces the Jeep Renegade (BV), Jeep Compass (BU) and Fiat 500X (FD) models, from June 28 to July 2.

At the same time, Toyota Motor also announced that due to shortage of parts supply, from June 17 to suspend the operation of some Toyota plants in Japan, and June car production from 800,000 units to 750,000 units.

Chip manufacturers, despite the main fabs to maintain high capacity utilization, but still can not meet the market demand for automotive chips, the order delivery cycle continues to lengthen. May automotive chip maker Infineon revealed that the company's order backlog in the first quarter of this year has reached 37 billion euros, more than fifty percent of automotive-related products, 75% of orders in the next 12 months to deliver.

Automotive chips can not be delivered, car manufacturers are also facing delivery pressure. Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Kaellenius recently said that despite the market turmoil, the company still has a large backlog of orders. "Ola Kaellenius believes that the global shortage of semiconductor chips will continue this year until 2023.

In order to cope with the car "lack of core" less parts can not be delivered this problem, car companies even made a "reduction" decision. In April this year, Ford announced that it would sell some of the non-safety critical function chip "semi-finished" vehicles, the company promised to send the chip to dealers after a year, and then the dealers to help customers to install the chip.

02 car market continues to "lack of core", which is the most serious?

Since the epidemic occurred more than two years, why the automotive market continues to "lack of core"?

Previously, the consumer chip market was large and demand was strong, and after the epidemic, the world faced a "core shortage" dilemma, and foundry production capacity was prioritized to meet the production of consumer chips, while the automotive chip market was small, with high entry barriers and less capacity allocated.

With the gradual stabilization of the epidemic, the car market is gradually recovering, coupled with the strong development of smart cars, new energy vehicles, automotive chip demand is rising rapidly, but the fab production capacity is difficult to meet the production of automotive chips, thus creating a chip shortage in the automotive market continues to be a phenomenon.

Automotive chips are mainly divided into three categories: the first category is responsible for computing and processing, represented by MCU (microcontroller) and AI chip; the second category is the power semiconductor, represented by IGBT, silicon carbide, etc.; the third category is the automotive sensor, according to different uses, can be classified as measuring temperature, pressure, flow, location, gas concentration, speed, light brightness, dry humidity, distance and other functions of the sensor.

The industry pointed out that the current automotive market is mainly missing MCU, IGBT and other products.

MCU in the car almost "everywhere", including wipers, windows, seats, security systems, BMS control systems, body control and power control and other areas, due to the extremely wide range of applications, the industry believes that automotive MCU will continue to be tight until 2023.

Thanks to the explosive development of the new energy vehicle market, the demand for IGBT applications is high, and in May, media reported that ON Semiconductor's Shenzhen plant insiders revealed that orders for automotive IGBTs are full and no more orders will be taken, and the capacity from 2022 to 2023 has been completely sold out.

In addition, Peng car founder He Xiaopeng said in May on microblogging that the absolute number of chips in a smart car is more than 5,000, involving several hundred kinds. But the missing chips, many of which are proprietary chips. He Xiaopeng believes that most of the chips currently missing are inexpensive chips, rather than being much attention to start a business or very expensive chips.

03 two years "core shortage", the car companies chip "self-help" progress?

Continued "lack of core" tide, both traditional car companies, or new car manufacturers, are beginning to pay attention to the chip business layout, some of them choose to self-research chip, some choose to cooperate with chip manufacturers to achieve the chip "self-help".

Conclusion

Under the market of oversupply, car companies "core" may not be able to bring radical changes to the automotive market in the short term, but in the long run, whether self-research or cooperation with chip makers, car companies "core" can help improve technical strength, autonomy and Coupled with policies and a number of chip manufacturers to help, the future of the automotive market "lack of core" pain is expected to gradually ease, automotive and chip industry is expected to further synergistic development.