This week, consumers were surprised by the threat of rising HP prices due to the shortage of chips in the world. Fortunately a number of manufacturers did not give up on the situation.
Collected by us, this is the beginning of the problem, until the response of various mobile phone vendors on the market to face the threat of price increases:
1. Chip scarcity phenomenon
The shortage of chips has started to occur since May 2021. There are several causes at once, namely the Corona pandemic which hampers production. Another factor is China's move to limit the waste of energy from the industrial world which causes a shortage of silicon production needed to make computer chips.
Silicon production requires energy from coal, but is severely limited by China. Whereas silicon is used in making semiconductor chips for smartphones, cars and laptops. Most of the factories are in China.
"Increasing demand due to the global pandemic and energy crisis means that silicon shortages are inevitable," said Seda Memik, Professor of Computers at Northwester University.
In the automotive world, Mitsubishi reduced the number of production of 30,000 cars. Nissan and Suzuki had temporarily stopped production. This happened in May 2021. Scania in September 2021 announced to stop production of trucks.
Meanwhile, Foxconn, Apple's manufacturing partner, said the global chip crisis could last until 2022. In September, ordering chips was getting harder and harder until it took 21 weeks.
2. Impact for the laptop industry
Global PC shipments according to IDC reached 86.7 million units in Q3 2021, consisting of desktops, laptops and workstations. This figure only increased 3.9% from 2020.
Both IDC and Canalys have blamed the delayed supply of components due to the pandemic. The supply problem has not improved in recent months.
"The PC industry continues to be plagued by supply and logistics issues and unfortunately these issues have not improved in recent months," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for mobile and consumer device trackers at IDC.
Interestingly, this supply problem, according to him, has a greater impact on laptops than desktops. Because the growth of shipments of desktop PCs is stronger than laptops.
These reports surfaced shortly after Microsoft unveiled Windows 11, complete with several new Surface devices. Of course, laptop manufacturers such as Asus, Acer, Dell, and others will release laptops with Windows 11 in the near future.
"Scarcity of this component is expected to continue through the first half of 2022," Gartner wrote in the report.
3. The smartphone industry is threatened with rising prices
The scarcity or global chip crisis has not been overcome until now, it is even more protracted. In fact, according to recent research, chip scarcity could cause more disruption to HP manufacturers than previously thought.
The total number of smartphones shipped next year is estimated to grow only 6%, from the original projection of 9%. The vendors ordered chip components in bulk until the end of this year. However, they only accept 80% of the chip components from requests.
"This semiconductor shortage is likely to have an impact on all brands in the ecosystem. Samsung, Oppo, Xiaomi, are all affected and we are lowering our (shipping) forecasts," said Tim Kash, research director at Counterpoint Research.
Apart from smartphones, another industry that has been heavily impacted by the chip crisis is gaming consoles. The PS5 supply, for example, is predicted to still not be normal until 2023. Fans also have to be patient to wait for the PS5 price to return to normal.
"The supply of these chips will remain very low until at least September next year. In some cases, some consumers may not be fully serviced until 2023," said Takeshi Kamebuchi, boss of Toshiba's semiconductor unit.
4. Xiaomi prices rise in the market, other vendors survive
Due to the scarcity of world chips, Xiaomi decided to increase the price. Meanwhile, other vendors try not to raise prices and choose other strategies. Here is their response:
Xiaomi
Xiaomi has officially announced price hikes for some of its phones. According to Xiaomi, this price increase occurred due to the scarcity of components to produce mobile phones. They claimed they could not comment on other manufacturers who did not or have not increased the price of their cellphones.
We cannot comment on other vendors. What we can say, this is Xiaomi's effort to realize its commitment to keep margins of no more than 5% for hardware.
Samsung
Samsung Electronics, said it emphasized that it would not increase prices so that more people could enjoy the benefits of innovation presented in each Galaxy cellphone.
Oppo
So far, we have no plans to increase the price. In fact, when there was a shortage of chipsets yesterday, we actually entered into an understanding with processor manufacturers to maintain the supply chain to Oppo.
Scarcity now occurs precisely in 4G chips. As a result, many vendors have taken steps to adapt several cellphone chips from several manufacturers that are not widely used by cellphone vendors, apart from Qualcomm and Mediate.
realme
When contacted, Realme stated that there were no plans to increase the price of their smartphone.
Regarding the scarcity of chips, Realme has not experienced this until now. Realme can still accommodate chips for all Realme smartphone products, by looking for alternatives from other chip manufacturers, especially for the entry-level series.
Apple
Apple is finally affected by the shortage of chips. They did not raise prices, but they are said to have cut their iPhone 13 production targets due to this.
They reportedly could not get sufficient supply of chips from Broadcom and Texas Instruments, and then cut production plans for the iPhone 13 from the previous 90 million units until the end of 2021. Apple reduced production of the iPhone 13 by 10 million units, or about 11%, of that amount. .
