Mr. Ploss, you have been in the business for 35 years, on the Management Board for 14 years and as CEO of Infineon for nine years.

As a veteran of the chip industry, have you experienced something like this that is currently going on with overheated demand and delivery bottlenecks?

Rudiger Koehn

Business correspondent based in Munich.

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There was a phase at the end of the 1990s, at the beginning of this millennium, when the mobile communications markets grew rapidly with new technologies.

The demand shot through the roof with us.

We even considered assigning the chips to customers on quartered discs.

That exploded in the industry - only to fall down again very quickly.

Is that comparable to today?

The current situation is different.

Above all, the foundries, i.e. the contract manufacturers of semiconductors and suppliers of ours, have run into an enormous overload since last year.

This has not happened so often before.

It comes together quite a bit.

Almost all branches of industry are booming.

At the moment, it is not cellular communications that is running hot, even if it is at a high level.

In particular, the data world with the topic of “work from home” is a major driving factor.

In the auto industry, for example, the situation is coming to a head because there are catch-up effects from the Corona year 2020.

There is the accelerated introduction of electromobility, autonomous driving, networking in production, and the growing need for renewable energies.

Nothing works without chips.

Are you caught off guard?

Another difference to the past is the surprise effect.

The current market situation has far exceeded all forecasts.

While the market researchers initially assumed a base growth of 3 to 5 percent for the chip market, we are now at 4 to 8 percent, with the current boom being significantly higher.

The chip manufacturers therefore had a different planning basis.

In this way, the reserves on the production side in terms of capacities and stocks are quickly used up.

With such growth rates, the industry inevitably gets into a mess.

In the semiconductor industry, it is not possible to build significant capacities in the short term; larger steps take years.

But it has been foreseeable for a long time that, in view of the rapid technological advances, many industries are thirsting for chips.

What can surprise you?

The data world has become a huge driver. Nobody expected, for example, that artificial intelligence would break through in this way. The mining of the crypto currency Bitcoin also draws large computing capacities. All of this creates a corresponding need for semiconductors. If it attracts in some areas, it can quickly be displaced in other areas of application. In addition to the current overheating in the market, there are geopolitical tensions, the Covid pandemic and the consequences such as the sudden shutdown of many customers and the no less rapid restart of production. These are things that have not been assessed and cannot be assessed.