According to Baosteel, due to the COVID-19 epidemic, China’s automobile industry was facing a decline and a gradual recovery in the first half of 2020, and the growth was especially obvious from the second half of last year to the first quarter of this year.

However, due to the recovery of the automobile industry, the shortage of chips has worsened after the first quarter, in particular during the period from mid-May to end-June, while it was expected to improve in the future.

The current lack of chips impacted Baosteel’s cold-rolled automotive sheet sales by around 50,000 tons per month, but the annual sales remained above 8 million tons.