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by blueintegral 1985 days ago
I'm not in the car industry, but I am in the electronics industry and I have definitely felt the chip shortage. Some of my parts just aren't available, and lead times are 3-4 months. Seems to be the result of production stopping at the beginning of the pandemic and they still haven't caught up.
3 comments
__sy__ 1984 days ago
I was on a call with our Future Electronics reps yesterday and they more or less said the same. Every CM is booked to capacity as well. They said it's a combination of stopping production for almost 3 months and then an explosion of latent demand for consumer devices + WFH demand.

Btw, another interesting ramification of both the trade war with China and the travel restrictions is that a lot of low/mid scale electronic manufacturing is being moved to Mexico.

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blueblisters 1984 days ago
> Btw, another interesting ramification of both the trade war with China and the travel restrictions is that a lot of low/mid scale electronic manufacturing is being moved to Mexico.

That's a first I have seen manufacturers moving to a country with similar wage levels. Last I heard, wasn't a lot of manufacturing shifting to Vietnam, Malaysia and to some extent, India?

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blueblisters 1984 days ago
It's true for a lot of commodities too. The prices for Steel have increased to over 45% of the price levels seen in January 2020. Capacity isn't coming up fast even enough to meet the demand, and manufacturers won't invest in new capacity because they know the demand is transient.
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stephen_g 1984 days ago
Yeah, definitely noticed this. For example, I designed something (low volume) at the start of 2020 with a precision gyroscope that was easily available with over a hundred in stock each at Digikey, Mouser, Avnet etc. and when it came to starting building them around October/November, nobody had any parts of any of the variants in stock and the lead time said 22 weeks...

Although looking now for that part at least the shortage seems to be easing - there are about a dozen showing up as available across a few places on Octopart and the lead time seems to have dropped back to eight weeks.

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