NXP CEO Kurt Sievers said in a conversation with analysts on Tuesday that he expects the deficits to be felt until 2022. NXP’s customers – car manufacturers and suppliers such as Bosch and Continental – continue to pressure NXP to get their hands on ordered chips sooner. But that doesn’t help.
Car-maker Ford has signed a deal with chip maker GlobalFoundries to help solve the auto industry’s semiconductor supply shortfalls that are holding up production lines.
Looks like the automotive industry, rather than Pine64 and Fairphone, have become Purism’s worst competitors.
What are Purism’s options to maintain and defend their place in NXP’s backorder queue against car giants and their lackeys, anyway?
I hear your concern but you may be talking about two different issues. There does appear to be a hang up in the chip supply for the Librem 5, but I don’t necessarily think that making more of one thing (car chips) necessarily diminishes the output of another thing (phone chips) when it’s not clear how much NXT compartmentalizes operations and/or may be expanding manufacturing capabilities. Not to mention that companies that make phones and tech/comm devices are worth far more than car companies. https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Smaller companies like Purism should benefit from that (at least in terms of competition from car makers).
What are Purism’s options to maintain and defend their place in NXP’s backorder queue against car giants and their lackeys, anyway?
The Librem 5 USA seems to be an attempt to address that issue. Either way, everyone and everything is feeling the pinch right now so I don’t think any recourse is going to fix things in the short term.
Looks like the automotive industry, rather than Pine64 and Fairphone, have become Purism’s worst competitors.
@Kyle_Rankin recently brought up the example of Ford as evidence that global industries as a whole are ramping up investments in manufacturing and supply which ends up benefiting everyone. I think that’s accurate.
While competition is a legitimate factor in business, often times it’s misunderstood. Competitors also develop synergies that help each other - expanding markets, driving innovation and ultimately helping each other make more money.
I have no idea… But even if they are, it’s not clear how NXT compartmentalizes operations and/or if they have expanded production. I don’t have enough info to know whether or not it hurts the phone market. The influx of money from automakers could result in more chips overall.
AIUI: Automotive demand is not unusually high. There is no influx of money i.e. not above pre-pandemic levels. The problem is that automotive production had previously been savagely cut in anticipation of a global recession caused by the pandemic. Consequently, automotive chip manufacturers also cut production of those chips.
Then everyone noticed two things.
Actually the economy didn’t tank nearly as badly as the pundits had forecast,
and with everyone working from home and stuck at home unable to travel or go out to restaurants, bars etc., people spent money on electronics goods for use at home.
The second of those items then sucked up a lot of chip manufacturing while at the same time automotive manufacturers were frantically attempting to reverse course on those production cuts.
It is taking a while to re-establish any kind of equilibrium in the supply chain.
Chip manufacturers probably are attempting to increase the volume of production but they may not want to invest in additional manufacturing capacity because there may be little or no evidence of any long term change. It’s a “chip blip”.
All of the above, if it’s even accurate, is generalising across hundreds of countries and thousands of companies. The experience of any individual country or company may be somewhat or radically different.
