FOCUS ON TECHNOLOGY
future production and mitigate future market disruptions . Implementing a fundamental change in production is not just about building a device but also managing the supply chain and procurement process , which are still inextricably linked to China .
A single regulation for Artificial Intelligence ( AI )
Smartphone manufacturing will not relocate quickly outside China .
and trialling 5G in manufacturing favours large companies / factories with the R & D capital to test and learn . These larger companies and locations have started to evaluate the cost and benefits of different deployment scenarios ( a key progression ). However , 5G will not be relied upon for production-critical applications at scale until 2024 .
New vehicle sales will not bounce back
The automotive supply chain remains unable to meet pent-up demand , thanks to the shortage of critical semiconductors . A reliance on outdated semiconductor process technologies with limited production capacity , proprietary designs and an opaque demand-signalling process has prolonged the semiconductor crisis in the automotive sector .
There are no quick fixes for problems that have been years in the making . Therefore , the consequences of the decision made by automakers in 2020 to cancel their existing semiconductor orders will last beyond 2022 . Ultimately , ABI Research does not expect new vehicle sales to return to the 90 million-mark — last seen in 2018 — until 2023 at the earliest .
No relief from semiconductor shortage
A combination of factors will take until 2023 to resolve shortage issues through additional capacity , verification of real demand ( versus panic 2X to 3X orders ) and the inflationary impact on consumer spending on products . Continued risk factors include social / political risks and the ability to bring new fab capacity online , on time , especially for tight engineeringspecified automotive and commercial vehicles . COVID-19 variants and the impact on nations without high vaccination rates also play a role in staffing of facilities and the transportation of finished goods and semiconductor supplies . woefully unprepared to react quickly and had been over-reliant on one market — China — for their manufacture and component supply . This led to the realization for many that a change and re-evaluation of strategies was needed in a shakeup of production and supply chains . Many vendors considered diversifying production and reducing their reliance on one single country , manufacturer or technology supplier , thereby alleviating future supply chain risks .
The outbreak has contributed to many along the supply chain accelerating and building up production capacity outside China and rearranging their supplier deployments , crystallising a need to fully understand their risk and exposure all along the chain . However , this will not happen overnight , as such an undertaking is not easy and relocating outside China will take time .
In the longer term , it will be incumbent on vendors and suppliers to put in place robust contingency planning to decentralise
Following in the footsteps of the EU and China , more and more countries are preparing their regulations to govern the design , development and deployment of AI . However , ABI Research believes that no nation will rely on a single regulation to govern AI . Instead , countries will develop guidelines , standards and regulations to oversee various aspects of AI , including data collection , storage , model transparency , future update and legal responsibilities . A good example will be the EU , which relies on General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR ), ethics governance framework , riskbased legislative framework and conformity assessments to govern AI .
The democratisation of robotics expertise
While the emergence of ROS and various robotics start-ups will offer real advances in the short term , robotics ( as a whole ) suffers from a significant shortage in expertise . In the long run , this will have an adverse effect on development and commercialisation .
REPORT
Smartphone manufacturing will not relocate quickly outside China
As the pandemic started to take a grip on the devices industry , it quickly became clear that many in the smartphone supply chain were
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