The global core shortage has affected many core industries, from the production of high-end machine tools, missiles, satellites, rockets and automobiles to the production of small household appliances such as washing machines, televisions, tablets and computers. It's not a day or two since the COVID-19 epidemic hit the world in 2020, and the core deficiency has become more and more serious. The epidemic has drastically reduced the mobility of people around the world, and the domestic demand for small household appliances has doubled. However, chip companies with overcapacity due to the backlog of chips have reduced their production lines. Now that orders have suddenly doubled, it will take a long time to quickly increase production capacity. Because chip manufacturing is a frontier industry of science and technology, the top chip manufacturers are only concentrated in a few developed countries, and the technology of chip manufacturing is extremely complicated and the equipment cost is extremely high. It will take at least one year to restore a chip production line.
Chip production bases concentrated in Texas and northeastern Japan were attacked by natural disasters, resulting in a rapid decline in their production capacity. Wen Ning Ke, CEO of mask aligner giant ASML, who is indispensable for making chips, said in a speech that the global core shortage has developed to a very bad level, and many enterprises have started to buy washing machines just to disassemble their own chips and carry out transformation. Toyota, a traditional fuel car manufacturer, had to cut production by more than 654.38 million vehicles this year. Huawei, which has just entered the automobile manufacturing industry, has to announce that it is difficult to achieve the annual output of 300,000 cars.
Another important reason for the global chip shortage is that the rogue state of the United States has banned China's high-tech enterprises such as Huawei and SMIC. Huawei mobile phone wants to use foreign cutting-edge chips, but it can't get the goods. Products produced by SMIC are not allowed to be exported. Faced with such a complicated international situation, although China has invested a lot of money in the field of chip research and development, and chip companies have mushroomed, it will take time for China to upgrade its chip technology. China's chip consumption accounts for 42% of the global chip production, but China's own chips can only meet 30%, and it costs trillions of dollars in foreign exchange to buy chips every year. That's why America can block our necks at will.