Supplier crisis: How Europe is now planning for the future!

Supplier crisis: How Europe is now planning for the future!

Vienna, AT - Corona pandemic has heavily shaken the global supply chains and illustrates their vulnerability. According to an interview with Peter Klimek, an expert in complexity research, the semiconductor deliveries in particular were affected, which represent indispensable components in products such as cars and smartphones. A sudden interruption of the supply chains led to massive price increases, long delivery times and a lack of availability. The standstill in the automotive industry made the crisis particularly visible, since essential components and pre -products could not be delivered in time, which led to production failures, such as the analysis of vienna.at Show.

supply bottlenecks in industry

The damage that this foci has caused is enormous. Klimek reported shortened flows of goods that affect not only electronic products, but also everyday goods such as food. For example, there were bottlenecks in yoghurt cover and packaging materials for medication. Travel restrictions also make the border crossing for truck drivers, which further tightened the situation. These problems have shown how fragile the dependencies between the different regions worldwide, especially in semiconductor production, where Europe only produces a small part of the chips itself. Over 80 percent of the chips used in Europe come from other regions, often China and Taiwan, which makes the measures to be more urgent.

In order to avoid future delivery bottlenecks, Klimek, head of the newly founded Supply Chain Intelligence Institute Austria (ASCII), has taken on the task of analyzing these weak points. In a Interview with news.at he expressed the need to strengthen the sales processes at European level in order to be able to react better to delivery bottlenecks. Politicians have already responded to the problem: Initiatives such as the "European Chips Act" are intended to promote the European production of computer chips and reduce the dependency on external suppliers. However, Klimek warns of realism, since not everything can be produced within Europe, which is why diversification is a crucial approach to encounter future crises more effectively.