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Originally Posted by chassis
Thanks Flamingi What does all of that have to do with parts shortage for BMW and other carmakers?
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As I wrote in a comment earlier, I might be in the wrong with the impact of those specific companies on parts shortage. The companies I named are manufacturing state of the art chips and many of the chips in car electronics simply don't need to be that powerful and use older production nodes. This opens up a fair bit of other companies that can produce those chips. But let's just assume either I am right in the automotive industry needing state of the art chips (e.g. for drivers assistance systems) or the current state of the industry is the same even for the older nodes.
So what does that have to do with the shortage? It's rather simple: the demand for sermiconductors spiked in the last months and the supply just can't keep up. That means there is less product on the market than needed and hence you might get less than you ordered. Additionally, as someone else mentioned, car manufacturers cut their orders due to covid, but the demand unexpectedtly didn't really slow down. So now they are getting just what they ordered (or even less), which is not enough to keep up with production. And they can't get more chips as the capacity of suppliers is booked out for probably the next couple years.
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Originally Posted by chassis
Which BMW supplier factory isn't getting components?
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Basically all factories that are doing anything with semiconductors.
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Originally Posted by chassis
The factory is owned by a company. What is the name of the company, and what city is the factory located in?
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I mentioned the companies, these (TSMC, Intel, Samsung for the state of the art nodes) do own multiple factories in multiple cities of course.
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Originally Posted by chassis
Who is their supplier of raw materials? Which of their factories (city name, please) isn't able to receive raw materials?
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I'm actually not quite sure who is the supplier of raw materials, but I think that is not the issue here, it's the production capacity of the foundries. The raw material is silicon and the foundries are creating crystals (they look like big candles) with a special crystalline structure, this takes about a month until the crystal is ready for the next step. It is then in sliced into thin wafers, which have to be carefully cleaned and polished in a clean room. I think this is still manual labours, so that takes some time too. Finally, on those wafers the chips themselves are produced, with some really really fancy machines. I mention the "fancy" machines specifically, because that's not something you can just buy to increase the production capacity. As you can imagine from the process I just described, the whole thing is not really flexible, so it can't be scaled up and down easily.
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Originally Posted by chassis
What happened to the installed "chip" capacity in the world that existed on December 31, 2019? Did it disappear?
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The capacity is still the same, the demand just exploded. Modern production uses just in time parts availability. It is simply too expensive to stockpile the parts needed for production. This is the reason why the whole production has to stop if one part is missing. Without any new supply they can continue just a couple days, or maybe weeks at most.