Since the start of the pandemic, the media have spoken extensively about the chip shortage affecting the global industry.
Restrictions linked to the pandemic have added to fires in key factories, very severe winter storms and energy shortages. All these elements have given rise to a perfect storm that has had a strong impact on the production of practically anything that needs more or less complex chips to work.
To better understand the phenomenon and try to remedy it, in September 2021 the American Department of Commerce launched an information collection campaign aimed at all operators in the sector, producers and users.
The appeal was met by more than 150 companies, including nearly all of the major chip makers.
The answers that have been provided help us to understand what the real extent of this crisis is.
Here are some key data:
⁃ The companies that responded do not believe that the problem will be resolved in the next 6 months.
⁃ For the chips that companies have identified as the hardest to find, the average stock has shrunk from enough to cover 40 days of production in 2019, to less than 5 days in 2021. only a couple of days. Every single unforeseen event in the supply chain can regularly lead to the interruption of production.
⁃ The chips that have been most affected by the shortage are the logical ones (medical instruments and cars), analog ones (energy management, optical sensors, radio frequencies) and optoelectronic ones (sensors and switches).
Chip manufacturers have been busy, increasing production to the maximum and putting billions of investments on the plate to further increase production capacity, but also thanks to the strong increase in demand (a trend that already existed before the pandemic), there are still serious imbalances between supply and demand, difficult to solve in the short term and requiring massive investments.
It should be noted that chip factories have been pushed to the maximum possible to try to plug the shortage, postponing important maintenance operations and creating an environment more prone to accidents. As we have already said, a hitch of a few days in a chip factory today can result in the production of entire industries on the other side of the world being stopped.
In all this, China has had and continues to play a fundamental role: the “zero Covid” policy has often and willingly entailed the closure of factories and ports for days or weeks.
The reduced availability of electricity (widespread drought which has significantly reduced hydroelectric production) and coal (partly due to the ongoing feud with Australia, which is one of the world's leading producers) has caused an incredible slowdown. of production in different regions of the country for months, with even scheduled blackouts in rotation.
These data clearly show us that in key industrial sectors for the economy, employment and security it is necessary to develop shorter and more resilient supply chains, impervious to the global crises that are taking place.
We do not even want to think about what would happen if tomorrow Taiwan, the world's first chip manufacturer, and practically the only manufacturer of the most complex and latest generation ones, falls into Chinese hands or is in any case the subject of a naval blockade or a long war of ' friction: a crisis that would probably make the one due to Covid pale.