The chip shortage has a new destiny and as we have been anticipating in recent days, this will not be beneficial for the consumer and it is reaching such a point that companies are beginning to be desperate. The problem of supply due to all the events on the planet is having a very curious outcome, and that is that important business groups linked to the PC industry are buying washing machines to be able to extract their chips and semiconductors and thus alleviate the demand they have.
The world is going crazy, there are no chips, it's that simple and as we will see below nothing is going to get better any time soon. It has been the director of ASML, Peter Wennink, at the presentation event and breakdown of his company's profits, who has sounded a new voice of alarm with devastating data that shows the desperate situation of the industry.
Does the solution for PC chips go through washing machines?
The executive is not thinking about it, it is that directly a company besieged and with water up to its neck transmitted it directly to him and given the global importance of ASML that is big words:
“The demand we are currently seeing is coming from so many places in the industry… It is so widespread… We have significantly underestimated the breadth of the demand. That, I don't think, will disappear”.
Wennink in addition to these statements indicated that the chip shortage will persist in the foreseeable future, where we already speculate with a date close to the beginning of 2024 as such.
On the other hand, the name of the company that is buying washing machines to start its semiconductors has not been revealed, but we do know that it is linked to the world of the PC because it is intended to create chip modules.
"I met the executive of a very large industrial company, a conglomerate, last week, and they actually told me that they are buying washers to rip out semiconductors to put into industrial modules. I mean, that's happening these days",
Now you could say it's an anecdote, but to be honest, it happens everywhere. It's a 15, 20, 25 year old semiconductor technology that's now used everywhere… driven by IoT-type applications.
This leaves us with a discouraging panorama that Wennink himself has been responsible for aggravating by giving official data on what can be expected from ASML for this 2022 and as we are going to see, it is not a good sign, far from it.
ASML will only be able to fulfill 60% of orders
The industry moves as fast as ASML says, wants to, or in this case, can. And it is that the CEO of the company continued with his statements arguing that they have more than 500 orders for lithographic scanners and that the offer they can promote for this 2022 is very scarce and they are at the limit.
The data is illuminating: ASML will only be able to send 55 machines with EUV technology and 240 machines with DUV technology for mature lithographic processes, which is the main existing bottleneck today.
This represents barely 60% of all the demand that the company has. This is going to affect the entire PC and server industry, delaying and making components a little more expensive because in a globalized world like this, to speak of semiconductors is to do so for industries such as the automotive industry (a 20% drop in car sales is expected) or the industrialization of companies to create new production capacities (there are delays in the new FABs of Intel, Samsung and TSMC due to lack of chips, among other things).
Therefore, companies are launching desperate measures to try to alleviate the shortage and achieve sales where they are now either stopped or have partial closures of normal activity.
