Toyota and Hyundai are among the carmakers less affected by the current lack of chips. Paradoxically, the accident at the Fukushima power plant helped the Japanese brand.
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The shortage of semiconductors, which has affected a number of industries around the world for more than a year, is a major concern for car manufacturers. Not all but the same. It is felt on all continents, but in some Asian countries the effects are less pronounced. For example, the Japanese carmaker Toyota has only minimal problems and similarly the South Korean Hyundai is facing a crisis better than, for example, the Volkswagen Group, including the Škoda carmaker. This is shown by the production plans of individual companies.
Toyota is one of those automakers that has hardly been affected by chip shortage issues until the summer. Toyota began planning better deliveries of components about ten years ago, when the accident at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011 caused wider supply problems. That’s when Toyota realized that the shortage of chips could not be solved in a short time, so it began to build up high stocks of these components. And that is now proving to be a strategy that works.
Many companies in this industry use a just-in-time system. This means that components are ordered from suppliers so that the delivery time roughly coincides with the assembly time of the vehicle. The carmaker thus has chips and other components available when it really needs them, so it does not have to rent large and often expensive warehouses.
The shortage of semiconductors began to appear last year after strong growth in demand for electronics. People who were forced to spend virtually all their free time at home due to the closures introduced in an effort to slow down the spread of the new coronavirus began to buy a variety of electronics. Microchip factories were running at full capacity, and when they could not produce more, they began to favor electronics manufacturers over automakers.
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But a lot has changed since the summer. Toyota announced this week that due to a lack of chips, it is reducing its planned worldwide production for November by up to 15 percent, which is about 150,000 cars. However, the year-round plan does not change and still expects to produce around nine million cars. The lack of chips forced the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Czech Republic plant in Cologne to stop production at the turn of August and September.
At the beginning of October, the Italian-American carmaker Stellantis, which this year was formed by the merger of the French PSA and the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) group, interrupted production at its plant in Vienna. “Production will resume there on January 2, 2022,” the company said. Stellantis in Vienna employs around 460 people, for whom the carmaker has reduced its working hours.
Germany, where the automotive industry has a very strong presence, is now at the beginning of the second wave of production interruptions due to a lack of chips. For example, Opel will not open one of its factories until January, which means the longest such shutdown in history. Volkswagen, Ford, BMW and Daimler also announced disruptions in Germany for the same reason. From the Volkswagen group production restrictions now also apply to the Czech carmaker Škoda and Seat, Spain, in both cases, depending on the situation, production is expected to be limited until the end of the year.
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The South Korean carmaker Hyundai also manages the chip crisis relatively well. It also cut off production at some factories this year, but its operations director José Muňoz told reporters about a month ago that the situation was already improving. The worst months for Hyundai were August and September. “Chip makers are responding very quickly,” he said, adding that US chip maker Intel, for example, is now investing a lot of money to expand production capacity.
Together with Toyota and Tesla, Hyundai is one of a handful of carmakers that have managed to increase production despite a lack of chips, Reuters reported. Nevertheless, Hyundai has decided to start developing its own chips in order to reduce its dependence on external suppliers in the future.
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