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It was actually an interesting point I heard raised on the radio regards the car industry. We are calling them right up to date and using fairly bleeding edge tech, but one of the problems they are facing in the shortage environment is that car manufacturers are very price sensitive and much of the tech they are using to build all this "Right up to date" stuff like glass cockpit dashboards, sat nav, adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance etc is using IC's that the industry considers to be relatively old tech and old processes.
In a nutshell, the industry is concentrating on new process, high margin products and when Ford or whoever else whacks in an order for 5 million chips based on an older process as they suddenly forecast higher sales, not the sales crash they predicted at the start of last year (Leading to orders being cancelled with suppliers) they well and truly have to wait in line, they can't just un-cancel last May's order for 3 million and ask for an extra two million on top, the lead time starts again and is longer than it was before to boot.
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