The shortage of microchips is becoming a growing burden for the European auto industry.
The Volkswagen Group wants to work in its Wolfsburg parent plant, the largest car factory in the world, only in the morning shift on assembly line 3, where the VW Golf rolls off the assembly line.
All other tapes stand still, said a spokesman on Wednesday.
The Group's own truck holding company Traton is also struggling with the bottlenecks in important electronic components and expects sales to fall in the second half of the year.
Stephan Finsterbusch
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Christian Müßgens
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In view of such bad news, the association of European semiconductor manufacturers ESIA is increasing the pressure on politicians to get projects to promote the chip industry in Europe under way more quickly.
There is “no time to lose,” said Hendrik Abma, ESIA Director General.
Specifically, it is about a new “Important Project of Common European Interest”, or IPCEI for short.
Such projects with special state funding under the umbrella of the EU General Directorate Internal Market have existed for microelectronics since 2018 and for battery cells since 2019.
Now the chip industry wants an IPCEI-2 for its area - and as quickly as possible. The background to the project, which was discussed for the first time last year, was an agreement by important EU member states to invest around 150 billion euros in the internal market, digitization and other projects in order to cope with the corona crisis economically and to advance reconstruction. A third of the funds could be available for the further development of a globally competitive semiconductor industry.
The topic is urgent, because Europe's key industries such as the automotive and mechanical engineering industries depend on Asian manufacturers for numerous types of chips. In Europe today, around 40 billion euros of global sales are generated with semiconductors, which is less than 9 percent. In the 1990s it was more than 40 percent. There are large manufacturers such as Infineon, NXP and STMicroelectronics that are leaders in their specialist areas. But compared to industry giants such as Taiwan's TSMC, Korea's Samsung or America's Intel, the Europeans tend to play in the second division.
That should change by 2030. The EU Commission wants to raise the share of its member states to a fifth of global industry revenues. Given that the chip industry is forecasting sales of one trillion dollars around the world, this would correspond to a five-fold increase in the revenues of local manufacturers.
In the past year, the challenges were more evident than ever before.
The economic turmoil surrounding the Corona crisis resulted in a sometimes blatant shortage of chips, which continues to this day and primarily affects sectors such as the automotive industry, by far the most important branch of industry in Germany.
The almost unanimous view of the semiconductor industry is that the deficiency can hardly be remedied by the end of next year.
On the one hand, demand remains high due to the unchecked trend towards digitization.
On the other hand, the industry is actually working at full capacity.
Other countries help faster
Production capacities cannot easily be ramped up overnight. The production of a chip usually requires around a thousand different production steps, machines at a unit price of tens of millions of euros and a global network of companies. The production costs not only a lot of money, but also more time, depending on the type of chips between three and nine months. In addition, the construction, installation and alignment of a new chip factory can take up to five years.
Other countries are already speeding up a lot.
For example, the United States has a $ 52 billion domestic manufacturing capacity program in the pipeline.
South Korea can actually help its chip manufacturers overnight with 65 billion dollars.
China is unwinding a $ 160 billion program to create an efficient chip industry.
"To turn the tide for the European chip industry, Europe must not allow its most promising instrument to be delayed," says ESIA Director General Abma with a view to the new IPCEI.
In order to want to invest in Europe in the face of strong competition in America and Asia and the already openly expressed interest of chip manufacturers there, the political framework would have to improve quickly.
Unusual measures
The Traton Holding, which includes the manufacturers MAN, Scania and Navistar, shows how great the burden is. Although it needs fewer semiconductors for its trucks and buses than for a modern passenger car, the delivery bottlenecks for chips and other important parts have been leading to lower sales volumes since August, as the Munich-based company announced on Wednesday.
“As a result, sales suffer particularly in September. This situation is likely to continue in the further course of the year and into the coming year, ”warns Traton CEO Matthias Gründler. In order to still be able to serve as many customers as possible, the manufacturers under the umbrella of the holding resort to unusual means: In some cases, control units are removed from stock vehicles and used in ordered vehicles in order to shorten delivery times for customers, it said on Wednesday.
The VW Group as a whole is also under great pressure.
In March, VW boss Herbert Diess had already warned the FAZ of the drastic consequences for the industry.
"So far we have not been able to build around 100,000 cars due to a lack of semiconductors," he says.
The number will continue to grow over the course of the year.
The short-time working has now been extended again for the Wolfsburg parent plant in order to respond to the lower workload due to the standstill on the production lines beyond the Golf production area.