ST abused me a thousand times, but I treated ST like my first love

With the growing tide of the lack of core, the electronics industry bitter "lack of core" for a long time, especially the MCU, from ST (Stmicroelectronics) skyrocketed, MCU has become a hot tip chip price rise in the tide. It is said that a lot of people in the chip market rely on MCU to make their pockets bulging, money countless, and achieve wealth freedom, bid farewell to sea work.

But for the program business is not so "carefree", the terminal and program business suffered, especially small terminal enterprises, in the wave of the lack of core trembling to find domestic replacement, an imprudently will be shot "dead" on the beach, facing shutdown, the risk of bankruptcy.

Core shixiang interviewed Jiangsu Can home intelligent Home Co., LTD. Fan, he mainly do intelligent clothes hanger, curtain control system scheme, and we will talk about the lack of core wave, he himself looking for domestic alternative "core" road and this way with ST love and hate entanglebles:

1. After ST was out of stock and up in price, I tried almost every major MCU on the market

2. Reflection on seeking "core" road

3. ST abused me a thousand times, but I treated ST like my first love

The following is Fan Gong's account:

01

ST out of stock after rising prices

I've tried almost every major MCU on the market

MCU is the abbreviation of micro control unit. In our industry, it is also called a single chip microcomputer, which is what we often say. Is the central processing unit (CPU), memory (memory), counter (Timer), USB, A/D conversion and other peripheral interfaces are integrated on A single chip, forming A chip level computer, and then can do different combination control in different application occasions.

For example, it is hard to imagine our life without the MCU, which is essential for our mobile phones, computers and cars.

MCU industry is highly concentrated, and its market share is mainly in foreign countries, such as Renesas (Japan), NXP (Netherlands), Infineon (Germany), Microchip technology (United States), Stmicroelectronics (Switzerland), Texas Instruments (United States) and so on, which we often deal with.

In the domestic MCU market, most of the market share has also been Renesas, NXP, STMICROELECTRONICS these foreign brands occupy, earlier years like us to do solutions, usually little consideration of domestic. In our commonly used ST MCU, one price difference is not big, two to their large shipments, stable performance, easy to use, also did not consider the replacement.

Our smart products (already connected to Mijia) use ST STM32F030C8T6. I remember that the price of this chip was only 2.83 yuan in 19 years, and each time we took goods later, the price was a little higher than before.

But I am engaged in technology after all, the understanding of the market is not as much as those who sell chips, so I did not take it seriously at the beginning, thinking that more than 2 yuan of things, and then the price rises, it can rise to where? Up to three, four is about right.

However, the price of this chip seems to be getting higher and higher as I take the goods again and again. I remember that the last time I took the goods was In September 2020. At that time, my agent friend who has been cooperating with me told me that "THE quotation of ST is 5 yuan".

When I picked up the goods for the last time, I remember it was January 2021. At that time, my friend said to me, "THE price of ST is 11 yuan now."

Me:??

To tell the truth, we only sell a board dozens of dollars, with the price of ST at that time, and then remove material costs, research and development costs, for us such a program business, there is no profit at all, and even money to do! Of course, the customer is not willing to increase the cost, we basically belong to do a set of loss, to know that we have to give tens of thousands of sets of products every month, at least 40K-50K MCU consumption, this calculation down, the more we do, the more the loss.

But I had no choice. Half of the orders I received at that time were still short of some chips, so I reluctantly bought a batch of chips to make up for the customer's orders.

Later, from time to time, I heard some peers talking about the skyrocketing news of MCU, only to know that in March 2021, the price of STM32F030C8T6 has reached 25 yuan, and a price a day. Later, I stopped paying attention to this chip, because it is useless to pay attention to it. If it goes up a little more, it will already be more expensive than our products.

Listen to peers, ST suppliers on the market, also require you to cash payment, up to the most exaggerated, the spot market price can't simply use, original and favour large customers, not points to us, in addition to the car the big-ticket items, the ordinary consumer electronic products can only use domestic MCU are barely survive this period of time.

I also heard that some of the hands of the ST chip, simply stop receiving orders directly, the chip inventory of the previous hoarding empty, earn even more than the normal receiving orders, this is also a way to survive, if I had known it would rise into such a cheap ST, I also ordered some more.

Faced with the chip I can't afford, IT's not like I didn't think about it. Since the year 2000, I have tried several schemes, such as Hangshun, Xintang, GD, etc. It is no exaggeration to say that, combined with the replacement of our other products, we have tried almost all the mainstream MCU in the market.

The market is good, but it happened that these MCU used in our products are always "acclimated", the bug. I spent most of those months debugging solutions and doing tests. At that time, the mood is like shaking the license plate number, always feel this success, but always holding hope, with disappointment, let a person feel far away.

Later, we changed CKS32F030C8T6 of CKS. The earliest supply price of this chip was similar to THAT of STM32F030C8T6. But when STM32F030C8T6 rose to more than 10 yuan, CKS still offered us the price of 3 pieces.

If the CKS is also more than 10 pieces, we can't use it, so thanks to CKS, although we also paid a price, lost a batch of boards, but the time was not long, about a month to finish. But SMIC was also out of stock, and we had to keep replacing them in order to survive.

Later, we changed to an appropriate MCU, and there was no problem in the laboratory test. Everyone thought that the problem would be solved. As a result, the product was sold to customers, and there were many uncontrollable problems, and after-sales feedback was one after another.

The factory's requirement for our defect rate is less than three per thousand. If it is less than three per thousand, the factory is responsible for any problem. But if it is higher than 3%, we are responsible for the after-sale. During that time, the defect rate was 30 percent, even hundreds. In this case, we can only be responsible for our own, at that time the company more than 20 people, every day what do not do, not in handling after-sales, is on the way to deal with after-sales. After the after-sales feedback of the problem is too much, but we simply stopped.

At that time, I thought that after all, there was a problem with our plan. The most important thing is to deal with the after-sales service well and make customers satisfied. Every day on the platform to find a master door-to-door maintenance, to the cost of 80 pieces, back to the cost of 80 pieces, plus the cost of replacing the chip, logistics costs, almost a after-sales to more than 300 yuan, to eight hundred customers maintenance, casually hundreds of thousands of!

In the end, we calculated the loss of the shutdown period, at least more than 3 million, we were lucky. Some of my peers lost seven or eight million dollars in maintenance costs, and I can't even think about it.

In order to recover the loss, we took down all the tens of thousands of sets of good products and checked whether there were any recyclable materials. Up to now, there are still more than 5000 sets of products in the warehouse. Think about the labor cost, which is another hundreds of thousands of expenses.

After the after-sales treatment is almost done, we tried the smart MCU, performance and price are no problems, we just basically survived this dark day, think there are nearly two months to end this year, I hope these two months can help us recover a little loss.

02

Reflection on seeking "core road"

After all I've been through, sometimes I wonder why ST has gone up so much. Later, I learned that the epidemic abroad was too serious, and many factories in ST stopped work. Before that, there was a strike, which was also quite unpleasant. Friends in the industry say that August is 52 weeks of MCU due date.

Time online for the lack of "MCU" report also pretty much, I have similar to and from work every day to see news, what do you think about online report, vendor must be panic: want to stock up more, so the ST chips available in the market would be much less, if I can know the chip rose so much, I will certainly for more goods.

Another reason should be that at that time ST is not easy to do, in the circle of friends a variety of price letter one after another, ST, Renesas, NXP began to send a price letter, the original factory price, chip market can not rise?

However, fortunately we have survived, this period of time, I think it is nothing to stop work, deal with the after-sales service is nothing, the most important is that customers still dare to trust us, but also willing to cooperate with us. As I said before, the factory's defect rate is not more than three per thousand. Although our defect rate was very high during that period, we still finished all the after-sales services. In addition, the factory also understands our situation. In the previous cooperation, there was almost no after-sales service, and our previous scheme was no problem, so the factory still trusts our technology.

And some peers also lost millions of dollars, but the factory no longer trusts you and will not continue to cooperate with you. How can your company continue to do so if the customer is gone? That's how one of my peers went out of business.

So an enterprise is the most important is conscience, their own problems must not lie flat, compensate no matter how much money also have to recognize, the customer is the most important. Through the MCU shortage tide, you can also see who is the conscience of the enterprise, such as some domestic manufacturers, they are not rising, from the performance to the price let us sit up and take notice, so this foreign MCU shortage price, for domestic MCU manufacturers, may be a wave of market share, to create a new opportunity for brand image.

However, there are still many deficiencies in the development of domestic MCU, and there is still a long way to go for domestic MCU manufacturers to truly occupy a place.

03

ST abused me a thousand times, but I treated ST like my first love

Some time ago, the first thing I talked to my friends in the industry was: "How's the replacement search going?"

Now I chat with friends in the industry, they are thinking: "ST is slowly reducing the price, if the price is back to the original, should we continue to use?" To be honest, we hadn't really thought about it, because ST made us so sad.

As early as 2016, when we developed our first ordinary product, we chose STM8S003F4P6 of ST. In 2016, the price of this chip was only 1.05 yuan. After we finished our research and development, this chip has increased to more than 4 pieces, which was unaffordable for us as a start-up at that time. I did not expect to spend a lot of effort to research and develop the scheme, but finally did not market, lost a lot of time.

Later, we changed from ST to New Tang, and from new Tang to Lingdong, and it took a lot of time to stabilize the scheme of ordinary products. Therefore, ST has had problems in my company more than once. As long as there is a problem, solution vendors like us have to find replacement, stop work, lose money, solve bugs and deal with after-sales service.

Therefore, some engineers ridicule ST chip is "cheating and playing with women's feelings of men", always problems, prices change, not a single. But if we completely do not use ST chips in the future, it is not easy to say, after all, ST has great advantages in that: stable performance before the price rises, the price is close to the people; As an old IDM factory, ST has its own fabs with relatively stable capacity supply; In addition, I have been using the ST development board since graduation, and I am also used to it.

Therefore, I am still confused about whether to use ST in the future. When the price of ST falls back to the level of that year, maybe we will continue to use it, but before that, we will definitely prepare enough alternative plans.