Japanese carmaker Toyota says two of its plants in Japan will be tempo-rarily closed in March due to semiconductor shortages.

In February, downtime has affected eight of the firm’s enterprises and the shortage of cars has intensified, meaning the volume of unreleased cars is in the hundreds of thousands.

In March, production of cars will be suspended at Toyota Motor Kyushu and Toyota Motor East Japan.

The company will thus produce 950,000 cars next month, which is 100,000 units less than planned. In February, planned output had to be reduced by 150,000 vehicles.

A significant reduction in Toyota’s production began last year. The total volume of unreleased vehicles will reach 500,000 units by the end of next month.

“With regards to the shortage of semiconductor related parts, we will continue to examine the situation and consult with all companies in-volved in considering the use of substitutes where possible in anticipa-tion of a continuing shortage,” Toyota says. 

Earlier this month, the EU announced a €43 billion ($49 billion) plan to become a major chip producer, to ease dependency on Asian component manufacturer.

Volkswagen Group expects the short-term supply of semiconductors to the automotive industry to continue to be very volatile and strained in first half of 2022. The carmaker says there will probably only be a real upward trend in 2023.

In 2021, global production of 9.5 million vehicles was delayed due to a lack of chips, the European Association of Automotive Suppliers (CLEPA) said. Although this year could show a modest recovery in glob-al light vehicle production, supplier and market estimates still forecast, on average, production losses of 4-6m vehicles, CLEPA added.