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Cutting production to 33% on one line and 66% on another for their crown jewel F-150. The company reports earnings today after the market closes, so I read the

Cutting production to 33% on one line and 66% on another for their crown jewel F-150. The company reports earnings today after the market closes, so I read the "for a week" part as calm optimism. Same goes for the "this could be over after the first half of 2021" comments (paraphrasing) from Ford and others affected by chip shortages. If demand stays high, then the only way out of this shortage is to build more fabs, and that takes time. Bosch has been building a fab for the past 3 years and AKM had to outsource to Renesas because its production was affected by a factory fire.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Are there any resources you could recommend on the root cause(s) of these semiconductor shortages?
- PhantomGremlin 6y ago
  One other root cause, which I haven't seen mentioned yet, is that the purchasing clowns at the automakers cancelled chip orders last year after the pandemic hit. Oops. The automakers love to fuck over their suppliers like this. But, sucks for them, those same chip makers have other customers who continued to order chips. Which, in production volume, can have leadtimes of 26 weeks or more.
- Jkvngt 6y ago
  Trump's ban on the export to China of certain materials and substances necessary for the manufacture of semiconductors is still in effect. Maybe China is prioritizing their use for military projects? Perhaps they have also sourced them from other foundries which had them on hand, using their substantial influence?
- totalZero 6y ago
  AKM had a factory fire: https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-factory-fire-shakes-up-pro-audio-industry https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-factory-fire-sh... Hybrid and EV production is more semiconductor-laden than traditional ICE production: https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/global-automotive-semiconductor-revenue-in-2020.html https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/global-automotive-se... Total vehicle sales have entirely recovered after initially collapsing during the March 2020 lockdowns: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALNSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALNSA Supply reliance upon TSMC and Samsung (customers include QCOM, NVDA, AMD, AAPL, MSFT) is a bottleneck that means CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, etc take longer to go from "oh there's more demand than expected" to "hey, that additional quantity just shipped": https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319580-amd-warns-xbox-ps5-pc-component-shortages-could-persist-into-summer-2021 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319580-amd-warns-xbox-... Similarly, that bottleneck means that increased demand from one segment affects supply availability for all the others: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3120449/semiconductor-shortages-are-spreading-warns-smartphone-chip-giant https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3120449/semico... Trump body-slammed China's chip industry: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-tech-chips-focus/trumps-china-tech-war-backfires-on-automakers-as-chips-run-short-idUSKBN29K0GA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-tech-chips-focus/tr...
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    While the AKM fire made life hell for some in the fall, I don't think it had a lot to do with the overall semis shortage (the current market for audio codecs is insane, but differently so than the rest of the semi market). The bigger issue has been the rolling effects of the pandemic supply chain interruption. All these factories are operating on a just-in-time system. They carry 0 inventory (often getting multiple shipments per supplier per day straight onto the factory floor). Semiconductors happen to have a deeper depth of those steps (Mine silicon->build/process dies->doping->wirebonding and packaging->PCB assembly->final assembly) than most of the other bits, and every single step in that process has been running with effectively zero slack. Once there's a single interruption anywhere in the line, it echoes forever (see [1] Just in time works great when your suppliers don't have correlated failures. It goes to hell and can take a really long time to recover from when lots of suppliers start failing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Are there any resources you could recommend on the root cause(s) of these semiconductor shortages?

PhantomGremlin 6y ago
One other root cause, which I haven't seen mentioned yet, is that the purchasing clowns at the automakers cancelled chip orders last year after the pandemic hit. Oops. The automakers love to fuck over their suppliers like this. But, sucks for them, those same chip makers have other customers who continued to order chips. Which, in production volume, can have leadtimes of 26 weeks or more.
Jkvngt 6y ago
Trump's ban on the export to China of certain materials and substances necessary for the manufacture of semiconductors is still in effect. Maybe China is prioritizing their use for military projects? Perhaps they have also sourced them from other foundries which had them on hand, using their substantial influence?
totalZero 6y ago
AKM had a factory fire: https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-factory-fire-shakes-up-pro-audio-industry https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-factory-fire-sh... Hybrid and EV production is more semiconductor-laden than traditional ICE production: https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/global-automotive-semiconductor-revenue-in-2020.html https://ihsmarkit.com/research-analysis/global-automotive-se... Total vehicle sales have entirely recovered after initially collapsing during the March 2020 lockdowns: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALNSA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTALNSA Supply reliance upon TSMC and Samsung (customers include QCOM, NVDA, AMD, AAPL, MSFT) is a bottleneck that means CPUs, GPUs, SoCs, etc take longer to go from "oh there's more demand than expected" to "hey, that additional quantity just shipped": https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319580-amd-warns-xbox-ps5-pc-component-shortages-could-persist-into-summer-2021 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319580-amd-warns-xbox-... Similarly, that bottleneck means that increased demand from one segment affects supply availability for all the others: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3120449/semiconductor-shortages-are-spreading-warns-smartphone-chip-giant https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3120449/semico... Trump body-slammed China's chip industry: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-tech-chips-focus/trumps-china-tech-war-backfires-on-automakers-as-chips-run-short-idUSKBN29K0GA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-tech-chips-focus/tr...
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  While the AKM fire made life hell for some in the fall, I don't think it had a lot to do with the overall semis shortage (the current market for audio codecs is insane, but differently so than the rest of the semi market). The bigger issue has been the rolling effects of the pandemic supply chain interruption. All these factories are operating on a just-in-time system. They carry 0 inventory (often getting multiple shipments per supplier per day straight onto the factory floor). Semiconductors happen to have a deeper depth of those steps (Mine silicon->build/process dies->doping->wirebonding and packaging->PCB assembly->final assembly) than most of the other bits, and every single step in that process has been running with effectively zero slack. Once there's a single interruption anywhere in the line, it echoes forever (see [1] Just in time works great when your suppliers don't have correlated failures. It goes to hell and can take a really long time to recover from when lots of suppliers start failing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game