CECIMO’s Reaction to the European Chips Act Proposal

CECIMO supports the European Commission’s aim to reduce the supply chain dependencies and develop a strategic autonomy in semiconductors’ production, as indicated in the European Chips Act Proposal published today.

The EU fixed the ambitious objective of reaching 20% of semiconductors’ market share by 2030 and has foreseen 43 billion made of public and private investments for the mentioned period.

The current shortage will probably last until 2023 or 2024. Therefore, we believe that it is necessary to adopt a strategy that:

• Mitigates the current supply chain crisis by supporting those sectors that experienced slowdown in production (e.g automotive).
• Guarantees targeted investments to avoid competitiveness setbacks, market share reduction, losing technological autonomy, etc.

The long-term objectives set in the Chips Act will be crucial to reduce the European strategic dependencies. Nevertheless, we believe that some off-the-shelf solutions (e.g. the use of robotics and additive manufacturing) can immediately support the semiconductor’s sector to strengthen their supply-chains effectively and efficiently.

We believe that cooperation among actors in the advanced manufacturing sector could result in a faster response to this issue and could ultimately increase the resilience of our internal market from future shortages. Therefore, we will also promote the discussion of this issue in the framework of the Industry Forum Task Force 5 on advanced manufacturing.

CECIMO will analyse the proposal and continue to work in cooperation with all the relevant industry stakeholders.

Our goal is to contribute to developing an efficient and resilient semiconductors supply chain, which will contribute, among other things, to preserving the European global leadership in advanced manufacturing.