German semiconductor producer Infineon Technologies AG on Tuesday said that microchip supply bottlenecks could continue into next year, in a blow to the auto industry.
“We predict that the imbalance between supply and demand will continue for a few quarters yet, with the risk that it lasts into 2022,” Infineon chief executive Reinhard Ploss said in a virtual news conference.
He added that the “bottlenecks” are a particular problem for the Munich-based company in areas where they do not produce the chips themselves, but buy them from subcontractors to equip microcontrollers for vehicles or smart appliances.
Photo: Reuters
The auto industry remains plagued by “severe delivery problems,” amid a rise in demand driven by a boom in electric vehicles, Ploss said.
Infineon, which plans to finish construction on a new chip production site in Austria later this year, has profited early this year from a booming semiconductor market.
“Electronics that help accelerate the energy transition and make work and home life easier remain in high demand,” Ploss said. “The push for digitalization continues unabated.”
While the surge in demand for electronic devices during the COVID-19 pandemic has helped chipmakers, it has also led to a semiconductor supply crunch in the auto industry, where chips are a key element in modern vehicles.
The shortage of chips has pushed many automakers to idle production lines for brief periods when they temporarily run out of supplies.
Infineon marketing director Helmut Gassel said that the shortage affected the production of about 2.5 million cars in the first quarter of this year.
The company reported sales of 2.7 billion euros (US$3.24 billion) in the first quarter, compared with analysts’ average estimate of 2.69 billion euros.
Infineon previously guided for second-quarter revenue of 2.5 billion euros to 2.8 billion euros, and third-quarter revenue of 2.6 billion euros and 2.9 billion euros.
The company predicted full-year revenue guidance of about 11 billion euros.
Infineon said its second-quarter revenues were particularly strong in its automotive segment.
SECOND-RATE: Models distilled from US products do not perform the same as the original and undo measures that ensure the systems are neutral, the US’ cable said The US Department of State has ordered a global push to bring attention to what it said are widespread efforts by Chinese companies, including artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek (深度求索), to steal intellectual property from US AI labs, according to a diplomatic cable. The cable, dated Friday and sent to diplomatic and consular posts around the world, instructs diplomatic staff to speak to their foreign counterparts about “concerns over adversaries’ extraction and distillation of US AI models.” Distillation is the process of training smaller AI models using output from larger, more expensive ones to lower the costs of training a powerful new
Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) have repeatedly hit new highs, but an equity analyst said the stock’s valuation remains within a reasonable range and any pullback would likely be technical. The contract chipmaker’s historical price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio has ranged between 20 and 30, Cathay Futures Consultant Co (國泰證期) analyst Tsai Ming-han (蔡明翰) told Central News Agency. With market consensus projecting that TSMC would post earnings per share of about NT$100 (US$3.17) this year, supported by strong global demand for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the stock currently trading at a P/E ratio of below 25, Tsai said the valuation
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has triggered a seismic reshuffling of global equity markets, with Taiwan and South Korea muscling past European nations one by one. With its stock market now valued at nearly US$4.3 trillion, Taiwan surpassed the UK, Europe’s biggest market, earlier this month, data compiled by Bloomberg showed. South Korea is about US$140 billion away from doing the same. The tech-heavy Asian markets have shot past Germany and France in the past seven months. The shift is largely down to massive gains in shares of three companies that provide essential hardware for AI: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電),
The US Department of Commerce last week ordered multiple chip equipment companies to halt shipments of certain tools to China’s second-largest chipmaker, Hua Hong Semiconductor Ltd (華虹半導體), its latest action to slow the country’s development of advanced chips, two people familiar with the matter said. The department sent letters to at least a handful of companies informing them of restrictions on tools and other materials destined for two Hua Hong facilities US officials believe make China’s most sophisticated chips, the people said. Top US chip equipment companies Lam Research Corp, Applied Materials Inc and KLA Corp, each of which has significant
RSS