The severe shortage of semiconductors in the high-tech world is posing serious problems for the industry giants. Samsung has decided to take the floor to anticipate the current crisis and the disappointments to come.
The production delays of PlayStation 5, iPhone 12, 5G antennas, graphics cards and some Volkswagen and Renault car models, to name but a few examples, are due to an increasingly accentuated shortage of semiconductors, components used in the manufacture of a large number of high-tech devices.
Samsung is one of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, and the company decided to sound the alarm this week during the company’s annual meeting of shareholders: the crisis is likely to last quite a while.
No new Galaxy Note this year?
Samsung co-CEO Koh Dong-jin believes that the semiconductor shortage will have a very strong impact on the production of the company’s various products during the second quarter of 2021. So much so that, to avoid add additional production constraints, it could skip a new Galaxy Note smartphone model this year.
This could allow Samsung to focus on the production of its terminals and other devices already on the market. The site The Next Web, which reports this information, qualifies the point however by explaining that Koh Dong-jin did not clearly associate the possibility of not seeing a new Galaxy Note coming with the semiconductor shortage, but both topics were discussed at the same meeting.
A worrying situation
One of the main causes of this shortage turns out to be, not surprisingly, the global Covid-19 pandemic, which resulted in the closure of factories last year.
While most have since been able to reopen, the sanitary conditions put in place very significantly slow down the production rate of the components, which must then be transmitted to the factories which are responsible for assembling the devices which are equipped with them and which face similar production limits.
While many companies, including Sony and Nvidia, have already mentioned the shortage of components to explain the delays in deliveries of certain products, the fact that Samsung is stepping up allows it to climb a new rung on the ladder of the problem, since as a semiconductor producer, the South Korean company has a different take on the situation.
To sum up, it doesn’t smell good for the months to come: not only is the crisis expected to last a long time, but it could affect more and more sectors linked to technologies.