Chips do not keep up with the cards – Kommersant

The Ministry of Industry and Trade is discussing with bank card manufacturers the possibility of extending the already overdue deliveries of chips produced at Mikron for another year. The plant is already receiving claims for hundreds of millions of rubles. The lack of domestic analogues has forced card manufacturers to switch to chips from Chinese manufacturers, which have tripled in price over the past year.

On May 18, the Moscow Arbitration Court accepted for proceedings the claim of Aliot LLC (produces bank cards) against the Mikron plant (produces semiconductors), follows from the data of the court database. The amount of the claim is 312 million rubles, the subject of the claim is not disclosed. Kommersant’s interlocutor in the bank card production market says that the lawsuit is related to the fact that Mikron delayed the supply of chips for bank cards to the company. The interlocutor of Kommersant in the Russian semiconductor market also knows about this situation. According to him, the delay was caused by interruptions in the supply of production materials and the high workload of the enterprise. In Mikron, as well as the general director of Aliot, Igor Vasiliev, did not answer Kommersant.

The situation when Mikron did not have time to supply chips to Russian smart card manufacturers is not new. In March, Oren Kart LLC filed a claim against the plant for 268 million rubles, which was caused by a delay in the supply of 1.82 million chips (the full batch was 2 million chips for 312 million rubles), CNews wrote. On May 10, the proceedings were terminated, as the parties entered into a settlement agreement. From the ruling published in the file of cases of the arbitration court, it follows that the parties agreed to postpone the delivery until November 30, 2023.

Kommersant’s source on the market claims that the Ministry of Industry and Trade is now trying to agree on the possibility for Mikron to delay the supply of chips for bank cards in such a way as to prevent new claims against the plant. “The delivery schedule has already been developed, meetings on it were held three weeks ago. Another meeting is scheduled for this week, ”says the interlocutor of Kommersant. According to him, the Ministry of Industry and Trade plans to achieve a one-year delay for Mikron. The Ministry of Industry and Trade did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

The situation in which Russian manufacturers of chips for smart cards (these are bank cards and SIM cards) cannot satisfy the demand of companies producing final products has already been taken advantage of by Chinese semiconductor manufacturers. A Kommersant source familiar with the organization of supplies of Chinese chips to Russia says that in the first quarter, year-on-year, Chinese manufacturers of bank card chips (XH Smart Tech, Watchdata) raised prices for their products three times, to $0.9 (about 72 rubles) per chip. The card manufacturer Novacard confirms that over the past year there has been a multiple increase in prices for Chinese components for smart cards.

Russian chips – despite the fact that they are not enough – are even more expensive. Judging by the text of the ruling in the case of Mikron and Oren Card, published in the file cabinet, the cost of one chip ordered from Mikron was 156 rubles. Novacard CFO Tatyana Dobrovolskaya fears that in such a price environment, it will be difficult for Russian cards on Russian chips to compete with Chinese smart cards, in the export of which (and not just chips) to Russia, China is also interested. On February 21, Kommersant wrote about the request of card production market participants to the government to introduce protective duties on foreign cards.

Nikita Korolev