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Picture from better days:
Renesas chip factory in Hitachinaka, Japan (archive
picture from
2011)
Photo: KAZUHIRO NOGI / AFP
The Japanese government is calling for international help.
Plant manufacturers from Japan and overseas should deliver machines and parts as soon as possible in order to get a Renesas Electronics chip factory damaged by fire last Friday back into operation.
"We cannot force companies to act, but we can ask them to do so," an economic ministry official told Reuters.
"More than a few" companies have been contacted - an unusual act of state aid in the event of production problems for a single company.
As "Bloomberg" reported on Wednesday, Toyota and Nissan have already parked workers to clean up at the plant in Hitachinaka, northeast of Tokyo.
Reconstruction is a top priority, and the auto companies, Renesas' major customers, are racing against time.
Two thirds of the microchips produced there are intended for car production.
Renesas boss
Hidetoshi Shibata
announced on Sunday the goal of producing again in a month.
Replacing some of the seven destroyed coating machines in the smoky clean room should take several months, according to a company spokeswoman.
"It is remarkable that so much now depends on a single factory," Fitch analyst Roman Schorr told Bloomberg.
The plant normally supplies 6 percent of global chip production for the automotive industry - but there is already a shortage economy there.
Suppliers have been unable to keep pace with the rapid recovery in car production since the end of 2020 and the simultaneous boom in the electrical industry.
The German government had already intervened in Taiwan, where the chip giant TSMC produces most of the semiconductor wafers for cars.
In addition to the imbalance, there is also misfortune
Toyota and other Asian car companies such as Hyundai have looked like relative winners from the crisis because they can afford expensive warehousing with parts inventories for three to four months - in contrast to Western competitors who have relied on lean just-in-time logistics and therefore had to take unscheduled plant breaks at the beginning of the year.
But the imbalance in the market was also accompanied by misfortune: First, the power outage as a result of the extreme frost in Texas in February paralyzed an Infineon chip factory and Toyota also had to stop a Czech car factory - and now the fire in Japan, apparently because of an electrical surge one of the machines.
Even before the fire broke out on Friday, Renesas boss Shibata had told "Bloomberg" that the auto industry would have to struggle with a limited supply of chips at least until the middle of the year.
At the moment everything indicates that this situation is likely to continue into the second half of the year.
The German auto supplier Bosch is now warning its customers: The fire at Renesas Electronics is leading to an additional shortage in the supply chain.
The Swabian company is working flat out to keep the impact as low as possible, it announced on Monday.
Market observers assume that the carmakers will miss out on revenues of 60 billion dollars (approx. 50 billion euros) this year because of the shortage of chips.
Millions of vehicles for which there is a demand cannot be built.
ak / Reuters, dpa-afx
