Ford’s pain highlights uneven impact of two-year auto chip shortage | – #Fords #pain #highlights #uneven #impact #twoyear #auto #chip #shortage
DETROIT/SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 3 (Reuters) – Ford Motor Co’s ( FN ) disappointing quarterly results underscored that disruptions caused by a global semiconductor shortage are still car concerns its manufacturers, but some suffer more than others.
Ford said Thursday that it has put billions of dollars under its control on the table and in the fourth quarter 100.000 car blamed the shortage mainly on not being able to get enough chips.
“We’ll see in 2023, there will still be volatility around chips,” Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler said Thursday. “I know there’s been a lot of talk about, ‘Okay, chip supply is over,’ but first of all car The larger, older nodes, which are the chips we use in the industry, still have capacity limitations.”
“We are trying to get as much as possible through the spot market and the brokerage market,” he said. “It’s hand-to-hand combat.”
Latest Updates in Auto & Transportation categoryToyota Nikkei will introduce two luxury cars in Japan, imageTechnologycategoryU.S. article with tax More Tesla, Ford, GM EVs eligible for loans, says article with description
See 2 more stories
Ford and other automakers scaled back production in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and chipmakers responded by shifting supplies to the consumer electronics industry. The auto industry has been booming ever since, though some companies have talked about a slow recovery in supply as it enters its third year of shortages.
According to Auto Forecast Solutions, by the end of 2023, about 18 million cars will be pulled from production plans due to the chip shortage.
“It’s easing,” Sam Fiorani, the firm’s vice president of global vehicle forecasting, said of the shortage. “There are more chips out there, and if you have the right access to them, your production will be good.”
General Motors Co ( GM.N ) Chief Executive Mary Barra said last October that short-term outages would continue but that overall semiconductor supply was improving due to agreements with chipmakers, and a spokeswoman for the Detroit automaker said on Friday that this had not changed.
German carmaker Volkswagen AG (VOWG_p.DE) in January 10said it expects production to remain challenging in 2023 due to ongoing chip shortages, but predicts supply will gradually improve over the course of the year.
Tesla Inc ( TSLA.O ), known for managing chip shortages better than most automakers, said last October that it was able to solve some chip problems by rewriting its software to use a different or fewer chips. The EV leader then said it bought about 1,600 different chips from 43 suppliers.
DENSO SLASH FORECAST
Ford is not alone in feeling the pain.
Toyota Japan’s Denso Corp ( 6902.T ), a leading supplier to Motor Corp ( 7203.T ), cut its annual profit forecast on Friday and warned that a chip shortage could lead to lower car production. Toyota in November cut its auto production forecast for the current fiscal year to March due to chip shortages.
The head of Aptiv Plc ( APTV.N ), another auto supplier that makes advanced driver assistance systems, car computers and high-voltage cables, said the impact of the chip shortage was not felt evenly.
“When you look at semiconductor issues … it’s much more of a focus than a general supply constraint, it’s specific suppliers that are causing the constraints,” Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark said Thursday. “We expect this to continue until 2023.”
Dutch automotive chip giant NXP Semiconductors ( NXPI.O ) CEO Kurt Sievers said this week that there are three types of automotive chips whose supply will remain tight through 2023. NXP still sees a shortage of 180-nanometer high-voltage microcontrollers in use. electric cars, some variants of 90-nanometer chips, and 55-nanometer chips with built-in high-reliability memory.
“They’re still tight, which means we’re still preventing car companies from making the cars they want to make,” Sievers told Reuters. “But this whole thing about millions of cars can’t be built, it’s going to be back at least until the end of this year, as it is with NXP.”
When asked why Ford was hit harder than other automakers, a company spokesman said the problems didn’t hit all companies equally and acknowledged that others have moved faster to protect chips since COVID-19 hit.
Ford executives said Thursday that they have opportunities to further reduce supply chain costs. Lawler said higher shipping costs for the chips and production disruptions caused by Ford’s suppliers cost 1 percent of the premiums paid by the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker last year. billion said that it constitutes a part of the dollar.
“While these issues are by no means limited to Ford, they appear to have disproportionately affected 4Q,” JP Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman said in a research note. “We expect these issues to continue through 2023, but will decrease as the year progresses.”
Reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit and Steven Nellis in San Francisco Additional reporting by Joseph White in Detroit, Jane Lanhee Lee and Hyun Joo Jin in San Francisco, Victoria Walders in Berlin and Daniel Leussink in Tokyo Editing by Matthew Lewis
Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
2023-02-03 21:08:26
Source – reuters
Translation“24 HOURS”