The world stops and launches the appeal: we are desperately looking for microchips

They control the world and we didn't realize it. Microchips are the invisible heart of cars, refrigerators, microwave ovens, smartphones, elevators, video game consoles and a thousand other devices that accompany us in everyday life. The coronavirus, however, has made them rise to the limelight. Yes, because the planet almost suddenly discovered that it was dry. The few manufacturing factories had in fact unanimously decided to cut production in the spring of 2020, assuming a thud in requests during the pandemic. Never was a prediction less accurate.

New life

While businesses and offices closed at the beginning of last year, life has indeed moved within the home. Business meetings have turned into video conferences, lunches and dinners have become online takeaway orders and the school has accelerated distance learning. In order to make forced quarantine more comfortable, homes have been enriched over time with small and large new generation appliances. Without forgetting the interpersonal relationships between friends and relatives, for a long time filtered exclusively from the screens of phones, PCs and tablets on Whatsapp, Zoom, Skype and other social networks.

In short, a race to mass digitalization has taken place in a short time, which paradoxically has caused a surge in demand for electronic "devices", and consequently for the microchips that manage them, thus taking the giants of every sector off guard. From car manufacturers to smartphone manufacturers, through household appliances and personal computers. All desperate for microchips and now forced to review delivery times and revenue estimates.

International intrigue

To further tangle the matter, an international intrigue is also thinking about it. In fact, there are those who, like China, sniffed the problem in advance by deciding to grab huge stocks of components from all over the world, thus leaving rival countries dry-mouthed. The Asian giant, among other things, has long occupied a dominant position in the market: 63% of semiconductors worldwide (the metal components of chips such as germanium, gallium arsenide and especially silicon) are produced in Taiwan, while the 91% of the world's chip production is based in Asia. A concentration of resources and infrastructures that has triggered the alarm in the United States, so much so that President Joe Biden has to hurry up an emergency plan to make the United States more autonomous thanks to an allocation of 50 billion dollars that it is already helping to set up four microchip factories. Even the European Union does not stand by: Brussels has in fact approved the Digital Compass program, to reach 20% of world production by 2030.

The present and the future

The move by the big names in the world, however, seems late. Indeed, the coming months will be critical for almost all production sectors. The first to capitulate were the car manufacturers. Stellantis, Volkswagen, Ford, Hyundai, Volvo and Audi, just to name a few, who before and who after, have suspended the assembly lines in recent months. In March, Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess said that the chip shortage had prevented the production of 100,000 cars, while in the first quarter of 2021 the crisis cost Stellantis a production loss of 190,000 units. On the other side of the ocean it has not gone better: the iconic American car manufacturer Ford has anticipated that it will halve vehicle production in the second quarter of 2021, extending the hypothesis of crisis also to 2022.

In fact, the real problems concern the near future. When it comes to sectors that move quantities of stellar orders every year, before matching supply and demand again it takes not a short time. “We still have a long way to go. It takes a long time to rebuild the production capacity, ”admitted the CEO of Intel, one of the world's leading manufacturers of chips for electronic devices. And Volkswagen itself has reiterated that the shortage of components will continue for a couple of years.

What will this mean? Probably that China will take advantage of this international economic crisis to consolidate the status of aspiring world leader and that the world, perhaps for the next two years, will have to submit to the conditions of Beijing in order to obtain in exchange the "alms" of a few million microchips in return.