Audi Says Company Faces Shortages Due To Reliance On Parts From Ukraine

Audi is the latest automaker to disclose that it has been stung by the ongoing global chaos contributing to an already-depleted supply chain. 

The automaker said that its plant in Gyor, western Hungary, is currently facing shortages due to its “reliance on parts suppliers in war-torn Ukraine,” Bloomberg wrote this week.

“We’re feeling the supply problems and our procurers are searching for a solution to normalize parts supply,” the company told Hungarian news site Telex. The company’s plant in Hungary was responsible for producing 1.62 million engines and 171,015 cars in 2021, according to Bloomberg data. 

The geopolitical volatility comes just weeks after we reported that one top shipping executive had claimed that the worst supply chain problems have “peaked”. 

“We are guiding in an environment where we are coming out of a pandemic, and we don’t have much experience with that to be honest,” AP Moller-Maersk Chief Executive Officer Soren Skou said in a Bloomberg TV interview in early February. “So we are saying we expect quite a strong first half of 2022, and then we expect what we call a normalization early in the second half,” Skou said. 

What we’re sure he wasn’t banking on, however, was a brand new disruption to global trade. Now, the Russia/Ukraine conflict is once again hampering the semiconductor industry with issues, as we wrote about this week. 

Little known companies like Ukraine’s Cryoin play large roles in the global production of semiconductors, Wired noted this week. Cryoin, for example, makes the neon gas used to power lasers that make patterns on chips. 

It supplies to the U.S., Europe, Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan – and the ripple effects of disruption in its supply “can be felt around the world,” the report says. 

Business development director Larissa Bondarenko told Wired that production came to a halt after Russia’s invasion last Thursday. “We decided that [our employees] should stay at home for the next couple of days until the situation is clearer, to make sure that everyone is safe,” she said.