Renesas CEO: Car chip shortage will ease by mid-2023

According to relevant reports, Renesas CEO Hidetoshi Shibata said recently that this round of global shortages will be eased by mid-2023.

Statistics show that Renesas’ total revenue in 2022Q2 was 376.6 billion yen, a year-on-year increase of nearly 73% and a month-on-month increase of nearly 9%. The growth of the automotive business was relatively slow, while the business grew rapidly.

Specifically, the automotive business revenue was 163.8 billion yen, a year-on-year increase of 54.3% and a month-on-month increase of 6.4%. In terms of the inventory of auto products, the inventory of related products did not improve much compared with the previous quarter, and was far lower than the expected inventory.

At this stage, the chip shortage in the automotive space is gradually easing, but we continue to see some shortages, and more importantly, growth will remain a strong driver for the foreseeable future, especially, the fundamentals of ADAS and electric vehicles Intact, it will provide strong structural growth opportunities for these automotive chip makers.

A few days ago, Shibata Yingli said in an interview that Renesas does not plan to build a chip factory in the United States and will continue to expand production capacity in Japan. He said that in terms of front-end production, regions such as Europe or the United States may not have a good supply of raw materials, and Renesas is investing in related technologies such as dealing with natural disaster challenges and maintaining some stocks for emergencies.

Customers in the automotive industry are currently trying out Renesas' first 7nm chip. Shibata Yingli said that automotive chips generally use relatively mature process technology, and Renesas will continue to use the 40nm process when expanding production.

Renesas also recently announced that it will complete the acquisition of Reality Analytics, Inc. (Reality AI), a leading provider of embedded AI solutions, on July 19, 2022, after obtaining Reality AI shareholder and regulatory approval.

The acquisition will enable Renesas to expand its tool suite and software products for artificial intelligence applications, and enhance Renesas' own ability to provide highly optimized hardware-software endpoint solutions. Among them, the combination of Reality AI's AI inference technology and Renesas Electronics' MCU and MPU products will achieve seamless connection between machine learning and signal processing.