Time interviewed Mark Liu himself, chairman of TSMC. He revealed that various allegations of customers who felt overlooked by TSMC, while others should have had a special priority, led him to form a team that gathered information about corporate customers’ stocks. Liu thus tried to find out which of the company’s customers really felt the shortage and who just decided to stockpile in anticipation of an even worse future shortage. It is well known that such behavior can only induce that deficiency or at least speed up its onset.
According to the results of its research, TSMC thus tried to allocate larger capacities to such customers who had a really significant shortage of necessary chips, which was evaluated according to the ratio of chip deliveries and delivered products that were to be equipped with them. This, however, surprisingly infuriated those who the TSMC evaluated as “spring frogs”. But Mark Liu makes it clear that “there are definitely people in the supply chain who are accumulating or accumulating chip stocks.”
However, this perhaps suggests that it may not be (only) companies, but even mere individuals acting as intermediaries and distributors, but that is a question. However, even in the graphics card market, they are from inflating prices blaming mainly distributors and we could also read that deliveries suddenly began to reach new people, who replaced the existing channels, which could be connected but above all with the sale of hardware to miners, which is rather a highly specific case. –
In any case, the accumulation of chips is also a problem, according to the chairman of TSMC, but this is of course just one of several factors. Someone is to blame for the current shortage, such as a number of car manufacturers who reduced their chip orders during the first period of the pandemic and then wanted to increase them again, finding that someone else had already taken up the freed capacity.
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