10,000 Audi workers were forced to work part-time because of a shortage of chips.

Audi was forced to cut production due to a shortage of chips, forcing 10,000 workers to work part-time, the German business daily reported.

The workers affected were those at Audi's main production facilities in Ingolstadt and Necasalm, the report said. Two production lines producing A3, A4 and A5 cars at the Ingolstadt plant will also be affected, and the change will take effect at the end of May. The assembly line of several models at the Nekasurm plant will stop this week, and the company has not yet made a decision on production in June.

In the past few months, a persistent shortage of semiconductors has forced car factories to shift from shifts to part-time work. Audi is not the only carmaker struggling to meet production targets in the face of global chip bottlenecks, with many canceling orders because factories are forced to sit idle, dealing a heavy blow to carmakers. Chip shortages have also forced carmakers to abandon some high-end features, including pre-installed navigation systems, to keep production going.

Jean-Marc Chery, chief executive of STMicroelectronics, one of Europe's largest semiconductor manufacturers, believes the chip shortage could last until 2022. He also said STMicroelectronics plans to double its wafer manufacturing capacity in European automotive and industrial sectors in the next five to six years.

Earlier this week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Angela Merkel) expressed concern about the EU's lack of expertise in making components such as chips and batteries, which are crucial to the production of cars and other products. "if a big group like the European Union is not in a dominant position in chip production, then I am not very receptive," Merkel said. If you are a car country, but you can't produce core components, that's not good. "

In South Korea, Samsung Electronics, Hyundai, the government and industry associations recently agreed to work together to deal with the shortage of automotive chips. Thierry Breton, commissioner of the European Industry Commission, said in an interview with Bloomberg earlier this month that Europe must change its "overly naive and overly open" approach to chip design and manufacturing if it is to double chip production in the region by 2030.