STM business & production sustainability forecast?

[Mecanix]

Despite its up-trending equity and healthy appearances very few we've spoke too as of late are getting accurate forecasting relevant to STM manufacturing and parts' stocks. This makes business planning difficult at our end and production impossible with those rather questionable long wait-periods.

Will this unplanned shortage situation improve soon? or do we need to start looking at hardware alternatives as per risk-management contingency already?

A word from corporate on this matter would be reasonable and much appreciated. Thank you.

[AndyJT]

We changed the design once already and picked a less popular STM32, one with stock everywhere (at the time) and bought enough until mid 2022.

Looks like it probably wasn't enough but what were we supposed to do ? Buy everything we could find and make the situation worse for everyone ?

It would be nice to have an insight on which of the F4 and L4 family (64pin,144pin LQFP) will be in stock soonest ?

Regards

[waclawek.jan]

> enough until mid 2022

Avnet/Farnell's estimates may be wrong, or may apply only to Avnet/Farnell. Ask around. Place orders and wait, you have a couple of months before going into panic mode.

> It would be nice to have an insight on which of the F4 and L4 family (64pin,144pin LQFP) will be in stock soonest ?

I don't think this is something anybody, including ST, can tell.

> Buy everything we could find and make the situation worse for everyone ?

This is quite the definition of reasons of current shortage, but - yes, be selfish.

JW

[Tesla DeLorean]

Others have got multiple hedging orders out into 2023 at this point. Other buyers have been staging/laddering orders based on the lead times provided.

Hard to gauge real demand, as this is mostly a futures market at this point, but without the physically delivery issues you'd have with Oil, Corn, Orange Juice or Pumpkins. You could take physical delivery of a $1B of semiconductors into a storage locker or small office suite.

Now the real question is who has parts/when, and are excess parts going to get into the hands of brokers, or secondary markets.

That's going to be the real inflection point where the dominos start falling.

The shortage isn't only on the IC side, but also for metal lead-frames. And probably other IC and clocks taking parts from the burned AKM facility.

There are shipping capacity issues with Walmart commendering boats to ship in tat for Christmas. One supplier told us boats turned around mid-ocean and came back to port because they could get 3x rates.

[Tesla DeLorean]

>> It would be nice to have an insight on which of the F4 and L4 family (64pin,144pin LQFP) will be in stock soonest ?

Free stock at retail distribution, that's a *long* way off, anything that shows up is going to be snapped up by piranhas, because it can be turned around for at least 3x the price, last items I had altering at DigiKey were gone in under 24 hours.

Remember time through a Fab is 12 weeks, it's only ever less if they are using slack time to build speculatively, and we're way beyond that scenario at this point.

If you have orders on the books, at least you have a place in line, and push-out or take at your discretion. From here on out, we're still 18 months for this to all work itself out.

Pick something the auto manufacturers have a lot of orders/capacity focused on as they are the biggest gorillas in the room.