From flourishing to floundering: automakers to face further issues
In the first half of 2020, the automotive industry took a hard hit from COVID-19 with demand nosediving, production shutdowns and allocation shifts focusing on telecommunications and industrial automation. As a result, sales went down a whopping 34%.
By the end of the year, demand for automobiles began to mend as sales improved by 19%. Though this is lower than previous years, some car manufacturers have already started to see the effects of this rebound and are predicting sales to reach that of 2019 – one of the best years in the industry.
Despite the automotive industry expecting to see explosive growth, its recovery is already being hindered by widespread electronic component shortages that are predicted to last until 2023. A dominating factor is the limited supply of raw materials, such as glass substrates, 8-inch wafers and ABF substrates, that are causing production and global supply to continue to narrow