As 2021 is drawing to a close, this year‘s crazy chip shortage market history is rare, especially with regard to MCU price increases and roasted seeds and nuts that went into madness.

Because of its excellent localization strategy, STMicroelectronics (ST) MCU has achieved great success in China over the past ten years and has a good ecological reputation.

However, under this wave of market chaos this year, ST‘s MCU has become difficult to find, and the price has soared. When it is not available, coupled with several rounds of official price increases, many users bluntly said that it has been blacked out and has been used by other products. Substitute.

Although many people reluctantly cut their love, the ST products are still selling well. However, in the face of huge public opinion and market feedback, ST has to face up to these problems and plans to make a big leap in production capacity.

According to foreign media reports, STMicroelectronics President and CEO Jean-Marc Chery said today that the global chip shortage in 2022 will gradually improve, and the entire supply chain will not be able to return to normal levels until at least the first half of 2023.

Regarding the prediction of chip shortage relief, Jean-Marc Chery‘s statement this time is basically the same as what he said in July.

But he also said that in the short term, the most important thing for STMicroelectronics is to deal with the problem of stock outs. To avoid excessive supply chain tightness and affect customer shipments, dealing with out-of-stocks is the company‘s top priority, and this is for all management. For the readers, it is a very difficult task.

Jean-Marc Chery believes that through experience learning, customers have discussed with the company to properly plan future demand and production capacity to provide a more reliable demand forecast for the semiconductor supply chain for flexible production capacity deployment. The company is also discussing countermeasures with customers and formulating capital expenditure plans. .

In July, STMicroelectronics pointed out that this year will only meet 70% of total customer demand, but as the company invests in production capacity, this proportion will rise to 85% to 90% next year.

Regarding production capacity planning, Jean-Marc Chery said that the company will invest huge amounts of money in the next few years to establish reasonable production capacity to support customer business development.

In terms of this year‘s situation, ST‘s capital expenditures are approximately US$2.1 billion, of which US$1.4 billion will be invested in global capacity expansion, and US$700 million will be used for strategic planning. These include the new Agrate 300mm (12-inch) wafer fab in Italy, the silicon carbide (SiC) plant in Catania, Italy, and the gallium nitride (GaN) plant in Tours, France.

In addition, STMicroelectronics plans to double the overall production capacity of its European factories from 2020 to 2025, mainly by increasing the production capacity of 300 mm (12 inches) and 200 mm (8 inches).

In addition, STMicroelectronics is also actively looking for external foundry resources. It is reported that due to the global shortage of MCUs, STMicroelectronics will outsource part of its MCU production to the foundry department of Samsung Electronics.

According to the editor of HaoQiCore Technology, STMicroelectronics is outsourcing the MCU products of its major customer Apple. This is also the first time STMicroelectronics has done this. It can be seen that ST is really serious in terms of production capacity.

As the basic control chip of the electronics industry, MCU will inevitably continue to grow in the future under the trend of IoT and automotive intelligence. Therefore, STMicroelectronics has ushered in a large number of verification opportunities, and has further accumulated technical strength, and its market share has also increased to a certain extent.