3 ms·

AKM had a factory fire: https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-factory-fire-shakes-up-pro-audio-industry https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/business/akm-fact

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

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