Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Kaellenius predicts that the global shortage of chips will persist throughout this year and into 2023.

“The semiconductor situation really remains, and will be a challenge for the industry throughout this year and next,” Kaellenius said at the Reuters Automotive Europe conference in Munich.

However, he said, despite market volatility, automakers still have a strong backlog of orders.

For information, volatility is a measure of the statistical change in a security’s price in a certain period.

“We haven’t seen any signs that demand will move in that direction (negative),” Kaellenius said.

He further said that as the automotive industry transitions to electric vehicles, Mercedes-Benz will play a ‘more active role’ throughout its supply chain right down to where it is mined for raw materials.

“We don’t stop at a battery cell factory. We have to go through the entire value chain here because there’s so much moving around,” says Kaellenius.

According to Kaellenius, it will take at least a decade for his party to transition the engine factory for making fossil fuel-powered cars to become factories that make fully electric cars. He is optimistic that the transition can be managed regularly in the future.