Car loading in the port of Hamburg: High inventories have meant that global car sales have not collapsed again despite the acute shortage of chips.
(Photo: imago images/Joerg Boethling)
Dusseldorf Actually, the big turnaround in the automotive industry should have happened last year. After the corona-related slump in 2020, things should really pick up again in 2021. But nothing came of it: Due to the global chip shortage, there were only slight recovery tendencies in the automotive industry last year. Concerns that the semiconductors could be missing for a long time have not gone away.
In 2019, i.e. before the corona and chip crisis, around 80 million cars were sold worldwide. The big downturn came with the pandemic, for 2020 there are almost 69 million new cars in the sales statistics. According to calculations by the Duisburg Center Automotive Research (CAR), this resulted in 70.5 million cars last year.
The lack of chips in car production is even more serious than the corona pandemic: millions of cars could not be produced by the major European manufacturers in particular due to a lack of semiconductors. The EU estimates that 11.3 million vehicles were not built worldwide. Because most manufacturers could still fall back on stocks, there were no major sales slumps in the past year.
However, there are big differences between the individual car manufacturers. Some companies have mastered the supply crisis for semiconductors much better than the competition. This applies in particular to the US electronics manufacturer Tesla and the Japanese Toyota group. Tesla almost doubled production figures in 2021, Toyota achieved an increase from 9.2 to almost 10.1 million cars.
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In Germany, the Volkswagen Group in particular has found it very difficult to supply chips. In many VW factories, especially in the main plant in Wolfsburg, production was suspended for weeks because the semiconductors were missing. Around 400,000 cars were built at the group’s headquarters last year, and the capacity at the Wolfsburg factory is more than twice as large.
Direct contacts to chip producers have paid off
Tesla and Toyota had stocked up much better with chip reserves. Therefore, the production breaks were significantly shorter than at the German industry leader. In contrast to Volkswagen, Toyota also has more direct contacts with large chip producers in Asia. Tesla already develops some of its semiconductors itself.
>> Read here: Why the car manufacturers still earn very well despite the lack of chips
For 2022, the automotive industry only expects a slow improvement. Volkswagen has already announced that the supply situation for semiconductors will be anything but easy again this year. In an interview with the Handelsblatt, VW sales director Klaus Zellmer said that things would improve after the summer break. He spoke of “a gradual recovery in the second half of the year”.
Toyota also warned on Friday of possible new problems with the chip supply. “The outlook for this year remains uncertain,” said the Japanese automaker. A lasting improvement can probably not be expected until 2023 – when new chip factories are put into operation and the automotive industry will get more semiconductors.
More: How the EU wants to bring modern semiconductor factories to Europe