The prominence of the guests can usually tell what significance an event has.
Not only Michael Kretschmer, Prime Minister of Saxony, has been invited to the opening of the new Bosch chip factory in Dresden, but also Chancellor Angela Merkel and Margrethe Vestager, Vice President of the EU Commission.
“Semiconductors help to strengthen the competitiveness of Europe as the cradle for top innovation,” is Vestager's conviction, which makes it clear that this is about much more than a factory.
Susanne Preuss
Business correspondent in Stuttgart.
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So far, chips have mainly come from Asia and America, the European manufacturers do not even represent a tenth of the market.
Semiconductors are of strategic importance in those sectors in which Europe is particularly strong.
Largest investment in the company's history
That is why the EU announced four years ago that it would encourage investment in this area.
The program called IPCEI (Important Project of Common European Interest) is intended to encourage companies to invest a further 6 billion euros with 1.75 billion euros in subsidies.
Bosch also benefited from this and received 140 million euros in funding for the factory in Dresden, which, at around one billion euros, is the largest investment in the company's history for Bosch.
The automotive industry in particular has been painfully affected by the importance of semiconductors in recent months.
Because there was an unexpected shortage of chips on the world market, entire factories had to interrupt their production, and the situation is tense across all value chains.
"There are still difficult months ahead of us, and the situation could remain tense until 2022," said Bosch boss Volkmar Denner in an interview with the FAZ shortly before Pentecost.
"The supreme discipline of semiconductor technology"
“The current global supply bottleneck for semiconductors is also an expression of the digitization surge in the pandemic,” Denner said this Monday at a press conference on the digital opening event for the factory in Dresden: “We have to maintain this surge in networking. Semiconductors keep digitization going. ”The market is expected to grow by 11 percent this year, to more than 400 billion euros.
Bosch has developed a corresponding ambition to contribute at least a small part to solving the problem.
The Stuttgart-based group is about the same size as Intel, the largest chip manufacturer in the world, with a recent turnover of 71 billion euros.
But in the concert of the very largest suppliers of chips, Bosch does not play along because the automotive supplier does not manufacture standard products such as memory chips, but semiconductors for specific applications.
"Chips for vehicles, we can be so self-confident on this day at Bosch, are the supreme discipline of semiconductor technology," explains the responsible Bosch managing director Harald Kröger with a view to the special requirements: what is built into the car has to withstand a lot of vibrations and strong temperature fluctuations over many years.