Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor Corp., a state-owned automaker that operates joint ventures with General Motors and Volkswagen Group, said microchip supplies at the company will return to normal later this year.
Chen made the forecast at SAIC’s shareholder meeting in Shanghai on Wednesday, according to The Paper, a Shanghai-based news website.
“The chip shortage, a problem facing the entire auto industry, is expected to be alleviated in late July, and [chip supply] will basically return to normal in the third or the fourth quarter,” he was quoted as saying by the website.
Chen didn’t provide additional details on chip inventories at SAIC’s subsidiaries or joint ventures.
In addition to building passenger vehicles, buses and trucks under its proprietary brands, SAIC operates two joint ventures with GM: SAIC-GM produces cars and light trucks for the Buick, Chevrolet and Cadillac brands; SAIC-GM-Wuling builds cars for the market-entry Baojun brand as well as light vehicles for the Wuling marque.
The state-owned company also has a partnership with VW Group, which builds cars for the Volkswagen and Skoda brands.
May output at SAIC slipped 14 percent to below 400,000. More than 77 percent of the company’s production volume was generated by the three joint ventures.
Behind a strong rebound in the first quarter from the coronavirus-battered year-earlier period, output at the company surged 32 percent to top 2 million in the first five months of 2021.
But the automaker’s year-to-date factory output trailed the comparable period in 2019 by 16 percent.
