Recently, Auto Forecast Solutions (“AFS”), a data forecasting company for the automotive industry, disclosed a set of new data: as of August 7, the global automotive market has experienced a cumulative production reduction of approximately 2,990,500 units this year due to a chip shortage. Sam Fiorani, vice president of the global automotive forecast of AFS, deduced that the automotive industry may not recover from the chip shortage until 2023 or even longer.
According to China Business News, since the beginning of 2020, the global automotive supply chain has been affected by the new pneumonia epidemic, the evolution of the international situation, the tight supply of chips and other factors, and the huge manufacturing system has revealed its fragile side, supply chain security issues have become the highest concern in the automotive industry, and the global automotive industry has stepped into the “lack of core cycle The global automotive industry has entered the “core shortage cycle”. And in response to the lack of core problem, more and more car companies began to accelerate the search for a deep binding with chip manufacturers. The momentum of major car companies to reconstruct the supply chain and bet on the chip field is becoming more and more obvious. They either invest in major chip makers, or reach deep strategic cooperation with major chip makers. So far, Geely, BAIC, SAIC, FAW, GAC, General Motors, Volkswagen Group, Ford Motor and other domestic and foreign car companies have established strategic cooperation with chip makers.
According to reports, on August 4 this year, STMicroelectronics announced that it will start cooperation with CARIAD, a software company of Germany’s Volkswagen Group, to develop automotive system-on-chip (SoC), creating a new model of cooperative development for software-defined cars. The goal is to provide processor chips for a new generation of cars based on the Volkswagen Group’s unified and scalable software platform. Through this initiative, CARIAD aims to give the Volkswagen Group a lock on automotive chip supply several years ahead of schedule.
Last November, Ford Motor announced a strategic agreement with U.S. chipmaker Microchip to develop the chips, which could eventually lead to joint production in the United States. For its part, Ford said that designing its own chips could improve some car functions, such as autonomous driving functions or battery systems for electric vehicles, and could potentially help Ford avoid future chip shortages.
Domestic car companies are also accelerating their alliances with chip makers. According to information released on August 9 on the official website of Shanghai Municipal People’s Government, SAIC and Horizon have recently deepened their cooperation around the international leading intelligent driving and cabin-driving fusion domestic computing platform project, targeting future-oriented large computing chip and computing platform, and jointly promoting the development and application of vehicle-grade high-performance AI chips. In the field of automotive chips, SAIC has invested in more than 20 chip companies such as Horizon, Amlogic Semiconductor, Core Titanium Technology, and CoreWang Microelectronics to accelerate the layout of the automotive chip industry chain. Meanwhile, SAIC also cooperates with Shanghai Institute of Microtechnology Industry to jointly build a third-party joint evaluation platform for automotive electronic chips to reduce repeated certification investment and shorten the certification cycle for chip companies, and promote the localization of automotive chips.
