Automotive chips have eased? Sources say IGBT is limiting electric car production

The recent impact of continuous price cuts and cut orders by consumer electronics terminals, consumer chips have been oversupplied; some chip manufacturers in the industrial sector also appeared in the first half of the pressure to go to inventory. Affected by this, the chip shortage relief also began to the automotive sector conduction, recently, including Hyundai, Volkswagen and many other OEMs have recently expressed the benefits of chip relief, including the outgoing Volkswagen Group CEO Dees believes that Volkswagen Germany and China market, the second half of the electric car will benefit from sales growth. Volvo also revealed that it has passed the most severe period of chip supply shortage, and even said it has returned to full supply levels.

So, is automotive chip relief really coming?

From the production side, since the shortage of automotive chips, the industry chain companies, represented by TSMC, have been trying to increase the supply. Data shows that 60%-70% of the world's automotive MCUs are foundries by TSMC. In 2020, TSMC's revenue from the automotive sector accounted for a very low 3% of total revenue; in 2021, with a 21.2% year-over-year revenue growth, its share of revenue from the automotive sector has increased to 4%; and in the recently released Q2 2022 earnings report (revenue growth of 36.34% year-over-year), TSMC's automotive revenue share was again raised to 5%, signaling that upstream supply is still rising significantly, providing fundamental support for automotive chip relief.

Industry analysts believe that the automotive chip is expected to see relief in the second half of this year against the backdrop of the industry chain's continued increase in supply. Dr. Kai Wang, director and CEO of CorePower Technology, also predicts that the shortage of automotive chips is expected to start easing in the third and fourth quarters of this year.

Some industry insiders believe that the automotive chip industry is still in the structural relief stage, "a car needs hundreds to thousands of chips, it is impossible to do all at once to ease the shortage of some of the chips in high demand, short-term supply, will continue to be short. Just the overall look at the shortage is now not as serious as before." It also believes that the shortage of key chips will still affect the normal production of cars if the problem is not effectively alleviated. Previously Azure Li Bin also expressed a similar view, "a car short of a part can not be produced." Among them, General Motors produced about 95,000 vehicles with incomplete components in the second quarter, and the vast majority were produced in June.

In fact, VW, Honda, Geely, GAC and other OEMs also believe that as of now there are still some chips in shortage, and some industry insiders are still worried about the easing trend in the second half of the year, "The second half of the year will slowly improve, but there are also uncertainties such as the epidemic that will affect the normal supply of chips."

IGBT supply to determine the production of new energy vehicles

Recently, a distributor in Shanghai said that part of the market demand can not keep up with the domestic replacement of difficult automotive chip prices are still high, including Infineon's power devices are still 30 times the normal price, NXP intelligent cockpit chip in recent months, the current price has also doubled the phenomenon, STMicroelectronics a power IC prices also doubled, the current price is more than 70 times the normal price. In addition, TI, Microchip, ON Semiconductor and other major manufacturers of some of the automotive chip prices also continue to fluctuate, the highest price is now more than 300 times the normal price.