The German giant has confirmed something very important, that chip supply is improving. It has been Herbert Diess, CEO of Volkswagen, who has given the good news, although at the same time he has introduced an important nuance that was clearly aimed at shareholders. Let’s look at the literal declarations of it, and then analyze them:
“Supply is improving, but even through the whole of 2022 we won’t be able to build all the cars we could sell. Despite everything, we will look for opportunities to increase production, especially in the second half of the year.”
Well, this tells us that, indeed, the supply of semiconductors is improving steadily, and this is a good sign not only for the automotive world, which has a great dependence on chips due to the rise of the motor-technology link, but also for the technological world in general, since semiconductors are the central pillar of this. Volkswagen already talked about this issue a few months ago.
However, it also makes it clear that we are before an improvement and not before a total recovery, which means that there will continue to be a shortage of semiconductors, and that this will be felt in the availability of some vehicles of the German brand. In this sense, the Volkswagen CEO specified that the top-of-the-range models of its premium brands are sold out for the remainder of 2022, and that we are in February.
I think if we put everything we’ve said into context, it’s clear that we are in the early stages of a slow recovery that should start to become more pronounced by the end of 2022. With this in mind, we can expect a full recovery sometime in 2023as long as things go according to plan and the COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t do its thing again.
We will have to wait to see how the shortage of semiconductors evolves in the rest of the markets, although for now I can confirm that the situation has also improved in the graphics card sector, where availability is increasing, and this has led to a slow price decline. They are still far from their recommended level, but it is a start towards a recovery, which as we have said, will be slow. In general, this is the situation we are seeing globally, a first phase of recovery.
