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Bosch started the project way before chip shortage, around 2017 [1] and opening it right on schedule. This is the second factory of this type, good foresight b

Bosch started the project way before chip shortage, around 2017 [1] and opening it right on schedule. This is the second factory of this type, good foresight by Germans and EU. [1]https://www.reuters.com/article/bosch-factory/robert-bosch-to-invest-1-bln-euros-in-dresden-semiconductor-plant-idUSL8N1JC2GE https://www.reuters.com/article/bosch-factory/robert-bosch-t...

AceJohnny2 5y ago
> good foresight I'd call it luck. I doubt that in the planning stages they could anticipate the auto industry order-then-Pandemic-cancel-then-order-again wave that messed up the logistics of the semiconductor industry.
- antattack 5y ago
  Deterioration of US-China (and US - Europe too) relations might have contributed to to the decision. Also, at that time it was obvious that power electronics was going to be in high demand, especially of SiC type.
- float4 5y ago
  It's not about the pandemic or luck. It has to do with strategy, more independence etc.
- lstoll 5y ago
  you don't have to predict that exact scenario to know that domestic semiconductor manufacturing is a good idea.
- igalic 5y ago
  It has nothing to do with the pandemic, but the strategy and investment in reducing reliance on external (to the EU, and Germany in particular) suppliers is not luck.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Absolutely. Even with the US, as much as Europe & the US are more aligned than not on geopolitical issues, the last 4-5 years have shown that is not guaranteed to continue indefinitely. And in terms of the fragility of the world's industrial and economic engines, perhaps this is a realization that globalization has gone too far and the pendulum needs to swing more towards slightly higher self-sufficiency. Not even for some philosophy of anti-globalism, but merely because things are too brittle as they are now.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  No, but they likely realised the fragility of the semiconductor supply chain, and anticipated that a whole range of global events could cause logistical problems and shortages.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Not really luck, most of the western world realizes that having most of the world's chip capacity reside within the zone of control of a repressive regime with incompatible political and humanitarian values is not a good long term scenario. They have planned accordingly.
  - sct202 5y ago
    Times can change quickly and unpredictably. It was not too long ago that Dresden, where this plant is located, was under the oppressive East German regime.
    - developer93 5y ago
      Dunno I wouldn't call 32 years all that recent either
      - goodcanadian 5y ago
        As my grandmother once said (sometime around her 85th birthday), "You know, in school, in history class, 100 years seems like a long time. It's not really."
        bobthechef 5y ago
        As the adage goes, the Church thinks in centuries. Who remembers the Arian crisis today? Things seem bad now? Wait a century or two.
      - lb1lf 5y ago
        Reporter: "What do you think the long-term consequences of the French Revolution will be?" Zhou Enlai: "I believe it is too early to tell." (This quote, while authentic, is too good to be true - the quote harks from 1972, and in context it is evident they are discussing the 1968 student unrest, not the 1789 revolution. Still...)
        5y ago
- ksec 5y ago
  The old 40 / 28nm Fab capacity had been in very tight supply for years even before the pandemic hit. This whole semiconductor shortage only happens to caught on by Mainstream Media now as they have a new direction to blame ( TSMC ) along with politics of China. And chip being important to cars has been known for a long time with stories going back to 2013 within the industry. So you can at least infer that Bosch knew this for a long time. This is their second Fab and it was planned in 2017 and confirmed in 2018. It is like TSMC, all of a sudden everyone talks about it. But in pre-2015 hardly anyone knew them or heard of it. Those that heard of it only thought they Fab chips for Nidia. It was Apple that bring them to the forefront. Sometimes I just think mainstream media is such an unreliable source of information I am wondering if there are any point reading them at all other than to gather the flow of current society sentiment.
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    From what I've read in the "mainstream media", TSMC is lauded for playing the king game with their foundry model, and pretty much everyone looks shitty for allowing themselves to become dependent on a single company on a seismically active, geopolitically threatened island.
  - CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
    > Sometimes I just think mainstream media is such an unreliable source of information I am wondering if there are any point reading them at all Bingo. I forget the name for this law/effect, but at some point everyone runs across a story in the mainstream news about which you happen to be more knowledgeable than the author/reporter/"expert guest" and the veil is lifted for a moment and you think "wow they really don't have any idea what they're talking about!" But then they go on to trust the opinion of these same outlets on economics or foreign policy, etc. > other than to gather the flow of current society sentiment. Even this I wouldn't trust. Perhaps if you treat it loosely as "the zeitgeist of manufactured consent" or "what They want you to think is the current society sentiment"
    - lasagnaphil 5y ago
      The name you’re looking for is the Gell-Mann anmesia effect.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  The pandemic they couldn't have forseen of course, but it is good management to recognize that having their own production capacity makes them more independant from suppliers. "Modern management" far too often tries to optimize short term cost advantages and completely ignores long term considerations. Which comes of course from public companies reporting quarter numbers, as if those were an indicator how the company works. On the other side, there are decisions, like building your own fab, which increase costs short term, but long term are a huge benefit to the company.
- puchatek 5y ago
  The foresight is more about EVs conquering the car market and what it would take to be part of that value chain
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Germany is playing the long game. Congrats.
- User23 5y ago
  Swabians have been playing the long game for centuries.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  Oh yes, we like to do that. Which is why we also need 14 years to build a new, medium sized airport in the capital.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Come around NRW, there are a couple of highways that are about the same age and still aren't finished. :)
    - bipson 5y ago
      Come around to Vorarlberg, Austria - where we talk about building a Highway in the 70ies or 80ies and never even start building it (all with official planning and studies and resident participation and environmental evaluations and public voting and discussions on the suggested variants). It has become a well known joke in the area. AFAIK we still don't know where it will be built, but there has been some progress... EDIT: They agreed upon where! But they don't know when and holding another forum due to public outcry over the chosen path... sigh. Meanwhile, Switzerland built the connection ~40 years ago [1] [1] https://goo.gl/maps/xNEp622mFP73Bewy5 https://goo.gl/maps/xNEp622mFP73Bewy5
      - dao- 5y ago
        The potential upside of delaying highway construction by a few decades is that you could, in theory, reconsider whether it's still a good idea. Of course that's usually not what's going to happen, and most likely the project will be pushed through anyway when there's hardly any public support left for it, as with Berlin's infamous A100 extension cutting through the city.
jonplackett 5y ago
Also will not help with the chip shortage anyway > The Bosch plant will make specialist power-management chips and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that are designed to carry out a single task, such as triggering a car's automatic braking system. > It will not however address shortages of products like microcontrollers which have forced auto makers to halt production and are expected by industry leaders and analysts to extend into next year.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Capacity is somewhat fungible, so if this enables Bosch to manufacture their ASICs in-house that frees up capacity somewhere else for other devices.
  - gnzoidberg 5y ago
    This
- JAlexoid 5y ago
  One of the things that is in shortage - ASICs for automotive industry. So it will help a little bit.
tomytosian 5y ago
I am not sure why EU? it will benefit germany only.

AceJohnny2 5y ago

> good foresight I'd call it luck. I doubt that in the planning stages they could anticipate the auto industry order-then-Pandemic-cancel-then-order-again wave that messed up the logistics of the semiconductor industry.

antattack 5y ago
Deterioration of US-China (and US - Europe too) relations might have contributed to to the decision. Also, at that time it was obvious that power electronics was going to be in high demand, especially of SiC type.
float4 5y ago
It's not about the pandemic or luck. It has to do with strategy, more independence etc.
lstoll 5y ago
you don't have to predict that exact scenario to know that domestic semiconductor manufacturing is a good idea.
igalic 5y ago
It has nothing to do with the pandemic, but the strategy and investment in reducing reliance on external (to the EU, and Germany in particular) suppliers is not luck.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  Absolutely. Even with the US, as much as Europe & the US are more aligned than not on geopolitical issues, the last 4-5 years have shown that is not guaranteed to continue indefinitely. And in terms of the fragility of the world's industrial and economic engines, perhaps this is a realization that globalization has gone too far and the pendulum needs to swing more towards slightly higher self-sufficiency. Not even for some philosophy of anti-globalism, but merely because things are too brittle as they are now.
toomanybeersies 5y ago
No, but they likely realised the fragility of the semiconductor supply chain, and anticipated that a whole range of global events could cause logistical problems and shortages.
ineedasername 5y ago
Not really luck, most of the western world realizes that having most of the world's chip capacity reside within the zone of control of a repressive regime with incompatible political and humanitarian values is not a good long term scenario. They have planned accordingly.
- sct202 5y ago
  Times can change quickly and unpredictably. It was not too long ago that Dresden, where this plant is located, was under the oppressive East German regime.
  - developer93 5y ago
    Dunno I wouldn't call 32 years all that recent either
    - goodcanadian 5y ago
      As my grandmother once said (sometime around her 85th birthday), "You know, in school, in history class, 100 years seems like a long time. It's not really."
      - bobthechef 5y ago
        As the adage goes, the Church thinks in centuries. Who remembers the Arian crisis today? Things seem bad now? Wait a century or two.
    - lb1lf 5y ago
      Reporter: "What do you think the long-term consequences of the French Revolution will be?" Zhou Enlai: "I believe it is too early to tell." (This quote, while authentic, is too good to be true - the quote harks from 1972, and in context it is evident they are discussing the 1968 student unrest, not the 1789 revolution. Still...)
      - 5y ago
ksec 5y ago
The old 40 / 28nm Fab capacity had been in very tight supply for years even before the pandemic hit. This whole semiconductor shortage only happens to caught on by Mainstream Media now as they have a new direction to blame ( TSMC ) along with politics of China. And chip being important to cars has been known for a long time with stories going back to 2013 within the industry. So you can at least infer that Bosch knew this for a long time. This is their second Fab and it was planned in 2017 and confirmed in 2018. It is like TSMC, all of a sudden everyone talks about it. But in pre-2015 hardly anyone knew them or heard of it. Those that heard of it only thought they Fab chips for Nidia. It was Apple that bring them to the forefront. Sometimes I just think mainstream media is such an unreliable source of information I am wondering if there are any point reading them at all other than to gather the flow of current society sentiment.
- acjohnson55 5y ago
  From what I've read in the "mainstream media", TSMC is lauded for playing the king game with their foundry model, and pretty much everyone looks shitty for allowing themselves to become dependent on a single company on a seismically active, geopolitically threatened island.
- CrazyPyroLinux 5y ago
  > Sometimes I just think mainstream media is such an unreliable source of information I am wondering if there are any point reading them at all Bingo. I forget the name for this law/effect, but at some point everyone runs across a story in the mainstream news about which you happen to be more knowledgeable than the author/reporter/"expert guest" and the veil is lifted for a moment and you think "wow they really don't have any idea what they're talking about!" But then they go on to trust the opinion of these same outlets on economics or foreign policy, etc. > other than to gather the flow of current society sentiment. Even this I wouldn't trust. Perhaps if you treat it loosely as "the zeitgeist of manufactured consent" or "what They want you to think is the current society sentiment"
  - lasagnaphil 5y ago
    The name you’re looking for is the Gell-Mann anmesia effect.
_ph_ 5y ago
The pandemic they couldn't have forseen of course, but it is good management to recognize that having their own production capacity makes them more independant from suppliers. "Modern management" far too often tries to optimize short term cost advantages and completely ignores long term considerations. Which comes of course from public companies reporting quarter numbers, as if those were an indicator how the company works. On the other side, there are decisions, like building your own fab, which increase costs short term, but long term are a huge benefit to the company.
puchatek 5y ago
The foresight is more about EVs conquering the car market and what it would take to be part of that value chain

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Germany is playing the long game. Congrats.

User23 5y ago
Swabians have been playing the long game for centuries.
hutzlibu 5y ago
Oh yes, we like to do that. Which is why we also need 14 years to build a new, medium sized airport in the capital.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Come around NRW, there are a couple of highways that are about the same age and still aren't finished. :)
  - bipson 5y ago
    Come around to Vorarlberg, Austria - where we talk about building a Highway in the 70ies or 80ies and never even start building it (all with official planning and studies and resident participation and environmental evaluations and public voting and discussions on the suggested variants). It has become a well known joke in the area. AFAIK we still don't know where it will be built, but there has been some progress... EDIT: They agreed upon where! But they don't know when and holding another forum due to public outcry over the chosen path... sigh. Meanwhile, Switzerland built the connection ~40 years ago [1] [1] https://goo.gl/maps/xNEp622mFP73Bewy5 https://goo.gl/maps/xNEp622mFP73Bewy5
    - dao- 5y ago
      The potential upside of delaying highway construction by a few decades is that you could, in theory, reconsider whether it's still a good idea. Of course that's usually not what's going to happen, and most likely the project will be pushed through anyway when there's hardly any public support left for it, as with Berlin's infamous A100 extension cutting through the city.

jonplackett 5y ago

Also will not help with the chip shortage anyway > The Bosch plant will make specialist power-management chips and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that are designed to carry out a single task, such as triggering a car's automatic braking system. > It will not however address shortages of products like microcontrollers which have forced auto makers to halt production and are expected by industry leaders and analysts to extend into next year.

pjc50 5y ago
Capacity is somewhat fungible, so if this enables Bosch to manufacture their ASICs in-house that frees up capacity somewhere else for other devices.
- gnzoidberg 5y ago
  This
JAlexoid 5y ago
One of the things that is in shortage - ASICs for automotive industry. So it will help a little bit.

tomytosian 5y ago

I am not sure why EU? it will benefit germany only.