Why is Toyota hardly affected by the shortage of chips in the market?

The answer is simple and difficult at the same time: Because it has an industrial strategy that is different from most companies.

I have read, without any surprise on my part, that Toyota is hardly being affected by the shortage in the supply of chips to the market, which is doing so much damage to some large automobile companies (Ford and General Motors have stopped some of their production lines), as well as other types of companies that need these components for their products.

After the Second World War, Toyota has been at the origin of new production technologies (Just-in-time, Kanban, etc …) that have later been assimilated by the rest of the companies, but Toyota has always gone one step ahead and especially in the close relationship it has with its suppliers.

Toyota’s chip suppliers are almost all in Japan, and in many of them it participates in its shareholding, so that the commitment of these suppliers with Toyota could not be more firm.

On the contrary, the suppliers of the European and North American manufacturers are located in Asia.

With the Fukusima crisis (the tsunami of 2011) in Japan, some of Toyota’s companies were affected, and they learned the lesson to improve their supply system by increasing the stock levels of those very sensitive products, such as chips.

And the result is that 10 years later, when the entire industry is having a hard time with certain critical supplies (chips) and it is announced that their limitations will still last for about a year, Toyota’s people are in production peaks with almost 10 million cars sold in 2020, and announcing its forecast of reaching 10.5 million in the next year.

Things don’t just happen. There are always causes and consequences, and short-term politics are not usually the best of policies. And unfortunately it is the one that most companies tend to follow.

And of course, then they pay their consequences.