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Volkswagen PHOTO: Reuters
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The German car concern Volkswagen has warned top managers in the second quarter to prepare for a bigger blow to production due to the global shortage of chips, according to the head of the brand Seat, writes the electronic edition of the Financial Times.
“Suppliers and the Volkswagen Group have told us that we have to face significant challenges in the second quarter, probably bigger than the first quarter,” said Wayne Griffiths, president of the Spanish brand in the group.
The warning carries even greater losses for the world’s second-largest carmaker, which said last year that it expects production to fall by 100,000 vehicles in the first quarter of 2021 due to a shortage of semiconductors.
VW has already warned that it does not have the factory capacity to recover lost production at a later stage of the year.
Griffiths stressed that shortages are the biggest challenge facing the company at the moment.
Production is expected to be affected by shortages by the end of the second half of the year.
Griffiths, who headed Seat last October, said flexibility would be most important this year. He pointed out that production at the plant near Barcelona is currently minimized and the brand decides which cars to produce only after receiving chips from suppliers – hybrid or traditional, depending on the components it receives.
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