China sure, to a degree (though they also make a lot of the phones and therefore just get shipped tons of chips), but wasn't Russia so short they stole washing machines for the chips? Or was that just war propaganda?
My recollection is that Russian troops/mercenaries/gunmen/whatever stole washing machines and dishwashers, but it was (presumably) just for regular theft/looting/pillagine purposes.
Separately, during the pandemic, various companies bought various products, including washing machines, to extract the chips within, because the chips were the supply chain bottleneck, so it made economic sense to purchase them at even 10x or 20x the "normal" price.
Washing machines etc could be on the sanctions list because they contain dual use chips, making them even more expensive to buy in Russia, but the troops are from regions where even the pre-war prices were prohitative.
That's the first I've heard of it being done during the pandemic. I would also be surprised that this would be only x10-x20 the price, rather than x100.
For sure; I mean, mine (a fairly modern, drum washer/dryer thing) cost like $2000 and the extremely basic functionality suggests the chip/SoC should be $20 or less.
But, I assume any company doing that in any kind of serious volume has some strategy for monetizing the "washing machine with chip excised" (?).
Also, my bike is VanMoof and they just went bankrupt, and it seems like "having inventory of almost-finished hipster e-bikes — EXCEPT those 1 or 2 key parts" was part of their fatal situation.
So I can imagine scenarios where you buy washing machines to extract chips to lose less money than you would otherwise.
It was a meme. You can buy the kind of chips that go into washing machines completely legally and unrestricted from multiple vendors anywhere in the world, and transporting them into russia isn't an issue.
I also remember hearing American companies were doing the same thing with washing machines just to get the chips for higher value products in the chip shortage.
