Recently, both the Gaming and Automotive industry have been bashed and currently are continuing to be as COVID continues to ravage supplies, leaving these companies in desperate need of parts and new chips.

Just like the mask mandate here in Shelby County, we also are currently having an all out situation for consumers alike. In both industries, there has been a rise in demand for both computers and automobiles. 

“Nevertheless, Cox Automotive hiked its 2021 U.S. auto sales forecast to 16.5 million new cars and trucks combined, up from 14.5 million in 2020, which was affected by the pandemic,” wrote Forbes contributor Jim Henry in a recent article.

Aleksander Kostovic wrote about the demand issues for computers in a recent article on Tom’s Hardware.

“According to IDC, the demand for PCs has remained quite strong,” Kostovic said. “Global shipments of notebooks, traditional desktops, and workstations have reached 83.6 million units in Q2 of 2021 alone. That represents a 13.2% increase from the same period in 2020.”

Both of these markets have seen a substantial increase ever since the pandemic in 2020 and are more likely to rise with many places coming out of lockdown.
Yet, the situation here with greatness comes downfall. In 2020, many plants had to shut down in countries such as China, Japan, etc. This led to a shortage of microchips which has begun to affect industries such as Toyota, Ford, and other brands due to microchips needing to be used within the making of a vehicle.

On the computer side, with devices such as brand new NVIDIA and AMD cards being in short supply due to them not being able to get the microchips that they need, it continues to affect patrons of the brands and led to global shortages when graphic chips were unable to be provided.

Of course this is going to continue as more plants shut down from things such as a lack of management or economy within their business, and can lead to more shortages.

What makes this even worse, is the fact that people are still interested in purchasing a brand new vehicle although there are shortages.

“There is no question that sales of specific models in specific geographies are being disrupted by low inventories,” Stated Thomas King, a Representative for J.D Power, in a speech about this exact issue. “But consumers are nevertheless demonstrating their willingness to buy despite having fewer vehicles to choose from in retailer inventory.”

Although these shortages are showing a horrible effect on these companies, yet, in the process they are also benefiting both us and the companies.

With the companies’ models of ordering parts while making cars, such as Toyota, they have learned that they need to fix the system and try to order parts earlier, rather than later. As this is showing other automotive industries what needs to be changed in order to prevent this kind of production halt again.
This also is going along with the computer companies that are also being affected.

Many were able to get by and produce one less computer or car, but ever since COVID hit, it shows them that they need to be ready to go and have parts on hand in order to survive through a situation like this.
For us consumers, it can hopefully show us to meet with demand and slowly stop demanding large quantities of these kinds of products. As they continue to slow down production and more are having to be produced in a short period of time.

This is continuing to hurt our economy and hopefully we, as consumers, can learn from this and instead of demanding on spot. We should show interest in these products later on or earlier on to prevent automatic large quantities of demand.

In the end, we have our upsides and downsides as to these shortages within our country that are continuing to affect us.

Hopefully, we can learn from this and see what we can do to benefit from this. Such as slowing down automatic demand and also figuring out how to continue to have parts on hand in case of disasters such as Coronavirus.

Our economy is beginning to pick back up and hopefully, orders focusing on cars and computers can be fulfilled as soon as possible with the availability of chips and other products needed.