The chip shortage is undoubtedly the biggest problem facing the tech industry today. And Qualcomm, as one of the key companies in the sector, is not only one of those directly affected (remember that it does not produce its own chips), but also one of those with a particularly privileged perspective on the sector. And, therefore, any assessment you can make on it should be received with considerable interest, especially at a time as complicated as the current one.
And as we can read in TheElec, the CEO of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon, you already see some improvement in the market, and expect more progress in this regard for next year. Thus, the situation for 2022, always in his opinion, should be much better than that experienced in 2020, and also better than that of this 2021. However, unlike some other opinion that we have been able to hear, in which it is affirmed that 2022 will be the year of full recovery, Amon does not reach that point.
As I mentioned a few months ago, when Jensen Huang made a similar forecast when talking about limited supplies in 2022, we must bear in mind that we are talking about a market in which we always work with a lot of planningTherefore, we can deduce that the heads of companies such as NVIDIA and Qualcomm already have enough information about the levels of chip production that they will be able to count on next year. In other words, if this came from other people it could be considered a prediction, but in this case it would be more correct to call it a warning.
The most “immediate” answer to this problem, and I enclose the immediate because in reality it is not something that can be done from one day to the next, it is the start-up of new factories with which technology companies with chip production capacity can satisfy the demand of other technology companies such as Qualcomm or AMD, but also of many other sectors in which electronics has become key (such as motor) and which are already showing the current inability to meet the total demand very seriously.
This has led to the most striking situations, such as seeing that an Asian company, Samsung, is going to create a new chip factory in the United States, at the same time that the American authorities are strongly opposed to Intel being able to increase its volume of production in China. On the speed with which it is possible to deploy these new production plants, the short and medium term depends on many sectors and especially Qualcomm’s ability to bring new integrators to market that contribute to the evolution of many, many other industries.
