On the same day that Apple announced blowout quarterly earnings as smartphone and computer sales soared, with the global chip shortage having only a small impact on its business, Ford Motor Company said it would be able to produce only half as many cars as planned due to a global chip shortage.
Jonathan Weber and Stephen Nellis for Reuters:
The contrasting results show how major players in the electronics industry, accustomed to the long time horizons of chip production, have mostly avoided major disruptions from the chip shortage. Automakers and their suppliers, with “just-in-time” production lines that can more easily be spun up or changed to produce different varieties of parts, have not.
Apple said Wednesday that it would lose $3 billion to $4 billion in sales in the current quarter due to limited supplies of certain older chips.
Still, that represents just a few percent of Apple’s projected sales of $68.94 billion for the fiscal third quarter, according to Refinitiv revenue estimates, compared to a massive 50% production hit at Ford.
Ford Chief Executive Jim Farley singled out a March fire at a Renesas Electronics Corp plant in Japan as a key factor in its chip shortfall. But some of the problems at Ford and other automakers are the result of their own decisions. Many cut orders a year ago when the pandemic hit, and then were caught short when auto demand rebounded much more quickly and strongly than anticipated.
MacDailyNews Take: Nobody has more more buying power than than Apple.
Here’s what Apple CCEO Tim Cook had to say about the global chip shortage during Wednesday’s conference call with analysts:
We did not have a material supply shortage in Q2. And so, how were we able to do that? You wind up collapsing all of your buffers and offsets. And that happens all the way through the supply chain. And so, that enables you to go a bit higher than what we were expecting to sell when we went into the quarter 90 days ago…
I would point to Luca’s point earlier about the shortages and those shortages primarily affect iPad and Mac. So we expect to be supply gated, not demand-gated…
Most of our issue is on legacy nodes. And so, on legacy nodes, there are many different people, not only in the same industry, but across other industries that are using legacy nodes. And so, in order to really answer that question on — accurately, we would need to know the true demand from each of these players and how that’s going to change over the next few months. And so, it’s very, very difficult to give you a good answer.
I think we have a good handle on our demand. But what everybody else is doing, I don’t know. And so, we will do our best. That’s what I can tell you.
