BERLIN: The shortage of semiconductors has hit Europe’s largest carmaker Volkswagen hard since the end of 2020, but now the German company has given a cautious all-clear.
There are currently no longer any acute bottlenecks, said Dirk Grosse-Loheide, who oversees procurement on the group’s managing board, reported German news agency dpa.
“In the last six to eight months we have not lost a single vehicle in production because of semiconductors,” he said at Volkswagen’s headquarters in Wolfsburg on Wednesday.
But he acknowledged that, at the moment, VW was still working through the backlog of orders that had accumulated in 2021 and 2022 due to the parts shortage.
“Otherwise, we are back to the normal level before the crisis.”
Grosse-Loheide said Volkswagen was taking steps to strengthen its supply chains, for instance by purchasing critical chips directly from manufacturers instead of leaving it to suppliers as before.
Volkswagen said it has signed direct contracts with 10 chip manufacturers, including Infineon and NXP, since the end of 2022.
In addition, at the beginning of this year, VW began to build up stocks of particularly critical chips. Grosse-Loheide said these purchases were cheaper than stopping the assembly lines in the event of a supply bottleneck, as was regularly the case in 2021 and 2022.
“The semiconductor crisis is not over, but we now have the situation under control,” he said. – BERNAMA-dpa
