February 7 news, the United States auto giant Ford plans to take temporary shutdown or cut production measures for its eight factories starting this week to cope with the impact of insufficient chip supply.
It is reported that the Ford plant in Michigan, Chicago and Kuotitlan, Mexico, will temporarily stop production, and the production line of the F-150 pickup car at the Kansas plant will also be suspended. In addition, four plants, including the Kentucky plant and the Oakville plant in Canada, will also reduce the frequency of shifts.
The shutdown will affect the capacity of some of Ford's popular models, including the Bronco, Explorer, Mustang Mach-E (Electric Mustang) and F-150. Since the Explorer and Mustang Mach-E models have been produced domestically, the suspension of the North American plant will not have much impact on the Chinese market.
Ford motor vehicles have previously said that the "lack of cores" may affect the sales of cars this quarter. Affected by this news, at the close of trading on Friday on February 4, the stock price of US stock Ford Motor fell by 9.7%, and the company's market value "evaporated" nearly 10 billion US dollars in a single day. As of the latest close of Trading On February 7, Eastern Time, Ford Motor's stock price continued to fall, now at $17.89.
Despite indications that the car chip shortage crisis that began in the first half of last year was alleviated earlier this year, expectations are still too optimistic for now. In addition to Ford, Toyota Motor, the world's largest automobile giant, also announced the suspension of production at several factories half a month ago. Toyota expects to reduce production in Japan by about 150,000 units in February and 700,000 units globally.
The reason why the problem of "lack of core" in automobiles cannot be solved in the short term is that on the one hand, with the continuous improvement of the degree of social intelligence, the demand for chips as the most critical component of intelligent devices continues to grow; on the other hand, it is the factory shutdown caused by the initial epidemic, and the mistakes of automobile manufacturers and chip suppliers in predicting the output after the resumption of production and work in the later period, resulting in a large number of orders being backlogged, so the impact of "missing cores" is also delayed.
According to a recent report released by Deloitte, the "lack of cores" is expected to continue this year, and the chip delivery period will be delayed by about 10 to 20 weeks before the situation can be alleviated by early 2023.