Jason Cardew
Analyst · your question.
And just to add to that and again, I think this is an industry issue. And I think Lear has a perspective through E-systems that's somewhat unique. Obviously, we're on calls daily with a microchip suppliers and our customers. And so, we have unique intelligence and insight to kind of generally gauge what's going on across the industry and around the world. And what started was as a wafer capacity constraint has quickly moved into the back-end processing of microchips. And the big issue today is the amount of downtime that's being taken with COVID related cases and increases with shutdowns in the clean rooms, in areas like Malaysia and Thailand. If you think about the microchip manufacturers, the majority of them do the back-end processing out of Asia. And so, as they go down, and I believe there's a multiplier effect because there is no inventory in the pipeline and vehicles are built up today that are requiring replacement parts, it impacts on a multiple level. And so, we're still seeing that. We're still seeing a number of key microprocessors and chip manufacturers that are having to go down for a number of different reasons. And so, taking that into consideration, that really helped us understand what and how we look at the second half of the year, and it isn't one particular customer. And our customers are much more sophisticated. I will say that the communication and dialogue we've had, they're much more sophisticated in respect to chips, the chip needs. It's now become the back-end processing of the microchip. And we don't see that dissipating. I mean, Jason did a nice job of showing what's occurred over the last 11 weeks, last 11 weeks, 10 weeks, we've received notices of continued downtime. And so, to me, it's three key points. One, the answer around real supply and demand with all the different releases are in the system. Two, when will the COVID related items with shutdowns in the back end of the processing be alleviated? And then three, the times to require to get back to more of a traditional inventory level. And so, even though we're in a much better position to we probably were and believe it or not, several months ago, wafer production seems to be more stable. The sophistication level of how we're looking at chips, the 1000s of chips are required, is much, much better. And if we can get through some of these, like I said, COVID related issues that are causing the back-end processing behind us, we should be in a better position. And that's why we're looking at this getting worse in the third quarter and then some improvement in the fourth quarter.