Compared with the beginning of the epidemic in 2020, the current chip crisis is "more severe".
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, mainland chips are currently experiencing the most difficult period since 2019. Mainland chip production fell 4.1 percent in the first quarter, compared with a 5.1 percent drop in March.
The epidemic in Shanghai, the center of the storm, has now formed a comprehensive effect:
According to Reuters Tokyo on April 22, Honda plans to cut the output of two production lines at a Japanese factory by about 50%, citing chip shortages and logistics delays.
Three days ago, Toyota had to shut down nine factories in Japan for the same reason. It also plans to reduce global production by 10% in May and lower its target to 700,000 units.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, in the first three months of this year, the output of integrated circuits fell by 4.2%. Chipmakers reported a bigger decline in March. That was the lowest quarterly production since the first quarter of 2019, when chip production fell 8.7 percent.
Large semiconductor manufacturers such as SMIC and Huahong Semiconductor have struggled to obtain components, and chipmakers have been struggling to procure some components, with chip production falling 5.1 percent in March.
On April 18, automotive chip company ONSEMI announced that due to the impact of the epidemic and prevention and control management, ON Semiconductor's global distribution center in China was forced to close, and it has begun to transfer production capacity to overseas distribution centers.
Aware of the seriousness of the problem, on April 19, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a voice: continue to implement the action of tackling the problem of automotive chips, and make every effort to improve the chip supply capacity.
Production logic is challenged
Toyota is a well-deserved expert in "lean management", and its cost control logic has been verified and polished for many years, which is a reference model in the industry.
However, under the multiple superposition of the epidemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war, this logic has been repeatedly frustrated. Although the recent financial report shows that Toyota still has the ability to "increase revenue and increase profits" in an unfavorable situation, it has announced several production cuts, and its production capacity imbalance is self-evident.
Toyota's experience, Bosch may be able to empathize.
Some Bosch insiders told Phoenix Auto that thanks to the steady supply chain relationship and the high requirements of the storage environment, Bosch almost does not stock chips and has been implementing "zero inventory".
However, this convenience strategy also made Bosch suffer, and because of the lack of inventory reserves to cope with unexpected situations, it was sued by Volkswagen and other OEMs.
Ten days further forward, Weilai Automobile shouted that it could not hold on: as early as mid-to-late March, it had been cut off, and the inventory had been exhausted.
Yu Chengdong's "loss" stem is widely circulated: he said that the chip with a market price of 20-30 yuan has been speculated to more than 2,000 yuan.
Some industry commentators believe that Yu Chengdong is exaggerated.
However, CCTV Technology reported, "At the beginning of this year, the SEG electronics market in Shanghai's Huangpu District, a core chip L9369 of the body electronic stability system produced by STMicroelectronics, the original price was only about 20 yuan, and has now been speculated to 2800 yuan, soaring more than 100 times", which can confirm that Yu Chengdong's words are true.
"A car cannot be produced without a part", in addition to the above car companies have successively expressed similar troubles, including but not limited to Honda, Yu Dongfeng Nissan, Great Wall Tank, Ideal, Tesla and so on.
Many car companies have said that they have encountered problems with the supply of parts, although some of them are reluctant to say which parts are missing. However, there is news that many of the people who tear up the production and operation of car companies are missing the core "that mouth".
The aggravation of the epidemic in Shanghai has undoubtedly deepened the lack of core.
The industry regards Shanghai as China's "core city", and the radiation area to the triangle region with Shanghai as the center is the chip base in China.
The TSMC semiconductor factory and SMIC headquarters in charge of the 8-inch wafer foundry are located in Shanghai.
Huahong Group, the second largest wafer chip foundry in mainland China, is also headquartered in Shanghai, and it also has a core business layout in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province.
In terms of integrated circuits, Shanghai's industrial scale accounts for 1/4 of the country, with more than 700 key enterprises.
Shanghai's status in the domestic chip can be said to be distributed from upstream equipment, materials, software, to the midstream chip design, production, packaging and testing, and then to downstream chip applications, and the industrial dimension has distinct superiority.
Therefore, when Shanghai suffers from the difficulties of the epidemic: isolation and blockade, suspension of work and production, logistics brakes, It is not difficult to understand Shanghai's "chip difficulty".
Is the difficulty of car chips due to the "mother's short board"?
What kind of chips are missing from car companies? Why is it so hard?
Mr. He, an automotive engineer, told Phoenix Auto that the shortage of automotive chips mainly refers to MCU automotive microcontrollers.
The MCU microcontroller is a computer that integrates peripheral interfaces such as central processing unit, memory, flash memory, counter, A/D conversion, and serial port on a single chip to form a chip-level computer.
Engines, gearboxes, ESP/ABS, windows, airbags, air conditioning compressors, etc. all need MCU to control, a traditional fuel vehicle has about dozens of MCUs, such as BMW 7 Series has about 40 MCU, and smart electric vehicles like Weilai, there will be hundreds of MCUs. These MCUs control different components, but they are all vehicle-grade chips.
In China, low-end chip MCUs such as 4-bit, 8-bit, and 16-bit domestic brands have a high self-sufficiency rate, while the mid-to-high-end MCU market is mainly monopolized by big brands such as Infineon, STMicroelectronics, Renesas, and NXP.
Regarding the high requirements of vehicle-grade chips, Mr. He said that consumer electronics can tolerate restarting after downtime, but few chips on cars can accept such failures.
Take the requirements of Renesas vehicle specification chip as an example: the chip is required to be able to work normally in an electrostatic environment with an ambient temperature of -40 °C to 75 °C, a humidity of 95%, and 15-25 KV, and a shelf life of 20 years, which is not allowed to be broken during the shelf life, and the product defect rate is below one in 1 million, almost 0.
In addition, the vehicle-grade chip should also comply with the specifications of the International Automotive Electronics Association: AEC-Q100 reliability standard, in line with the zero-failure supply chain quality management standard IATF 16949, and in line with the ISO 26262 functional safety standard, of which the ISO 26262 functional safety standard should be able to ensure sufficient redundancy under faulty conditions to ensure product safety, without affecting the safety of the whole vehicle.
"The difficulty is not great, but the requirements are high, and the profit is not high", which is the characteristic of automotive chips.
Contrast can cause harm. Consumer-grade chips do not have these strict requirements, people are tolerant of mobile phones below 0 ° C may not work, toy dog chips will be broken.
Mr. Ho said TSMC currently produces about 70% of the world's MCUs.
Chip manufacturers such as Infineon and NXP have shifted orders to foundries. Among them, Infineon transferred 65nm chips to TSMC in 2009; in 2018, Infineon outsourced half of its production and plans to increase the proportion of MCU outsourcing to 70% within five years. Renesas is even more exaggerated, in 2012, when laying off employees, it outsourced the MCU to TSMC, and the proportion of MCU outsourcing has reached more than 90% so far.
Because the chip lead time is too long (16 weeks from order to shipment, compared with 26 weeks for some complex chips such as ESP or navigation systems), it is unlikely to move to a second supplier in the short term. Therefore, when the supply of MCUs is limited, TSMC can almost only be required to increase production capacity.
And this means that the eggs of automotive chip production capacity are all packed in one basket.
But TSMC did not "earn double", Mr. He said, because the car chip profit war TSMC revenue of 3%, while the mobile phone chip is 48%.
Therefore, the objective reasons for the shortage of production lines caused by the epidemic, the suppression of tea energy by high-end chips such as mobile phones on automotive chips, and the increasing demand for chips in automobiles under the penetration of intelligent network technology are removed.
Subjective reasons: Compared with low profits and high requirements of vehicle-grade chips, chip factories are more willing to tilt production capacity to consumer-grade chips with high profits and low requirements, which is the most normal choice for manufacturers to chase the purpose of business interests.
This means that car-grade chips are not easy to favor.
The current shortage of parts and components has allowed the upstream and downstream industry chains of automobiles to reflect on risk management, with the intention of evolving into an ecosystem.
In addition, the long production cycle of the fab, the long lead time of the chip, and the black swan and gray rhinoceros that can enter at any time have brought strong uncertainty to the chip supply.
Write at the end:
Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the Automobile Market Research Branch of the China Automobile Dealers Association [1] told Phoenix Auto that in recent times, the demand for chip manufacturing has been frustrated at the high end (the demand for mobile phones and other products has shrunk sharply), and due to the hoarding of chips in the industrial chain of the world's automobile enterprises, the high sales and high profits brought by the current automobile supply-side control are the largest profit sources of chip companies, so as low-end backward production capacity of automotive chips, it has become the largest growth business of chip companies. In the future, the supply and price of automotive chips will be significantly improved.
This is the news that the pressure on global chip supply has been eased.
In China, with the release of the "Guidelines for the Prevention and Control of the Epidemic in Shanghai Industrial Enterprises Resuming Work and Production (First Edition)" on April 16, the upstream and downstream enterprises on the white list of automobiles have entered the operation procedure.
On April 22, the News Conference of the Shanghai Municipal Government on Epidemic Prevention and Control brought about the news that 70% of the 666 key white-listed enterprises had resumed work and production in one week.
Logistics have been relatively eased. Some Bosch insiders told Phoenix Auto that due to the continuous adherence to closed-loop production, there was a phenomenon of explosion before, and with the logistics transit policy, the production materials piled on the side of the road have been transported one after another.
Zhang Xiang, dean of the New Energy Vehicle Technology Research Institute of Jiangxi New Energy Science and Technology Vocational College, said that in the past two days, 6 transfer stations are planned to be established in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai regions. Among them, Shanghai is arranged in Jiading and Minhang, and Zhejiang is arranged in Hangzhou and Ningbo, but Jiangsu has not yet been determined.
In the past, the transportation of production materials was "factory to factory", but now, "if a batch of goods departs from Shanghai to Zhejiang, it may need to transit through Jiading and Hangzhou." At each transfer station, the trailer carrying the goods is loosened, disinfected, and the driver cooperates with the nucleic acid antigen test before returning. That is to say, the original transportation completed by one driver and one truck now requires three vehicles and three drivers, and the cost increases and the efficiency decreases, but fortunately the logistics is running," Zhang Xiang said.
Few are already happy to predict the countdown to the recovery of chip supply capacity. The shortage of manpower and supply chain materials is still a problem, in addition, under the support of many uncertainties such as demand and raw material prices, as well as unhealthy supply chain relations, the chip crisis is still there.