by Wolf Richter
Wolf Street
Industry-wide issue “may not be fully resolved until 2022”
If an auto assembly plant runs out of just one component that couldn’t be delivered because the component maker had run out of one type of semiconductor – of the thousands of semiconductors that go into a modern vehicle – the vehicle cannot be built, or cannot be finished and sold, and production halts. That’s essentially the problem that the entire auto industry is now facing.
Ford, when it announced earnings this evening, shed more light on what the global semiconductor shortage, “made worse” by the fire in March at a plant of a semiconductor supplier in Japan, means in terms of lost vehicle production and lost dollars.