It is more complicated than that. There was a massive shift in production of millions of devices from Huawei to other vendors including Oppo. This meant all those orders had to be cancelled and new orders had to be placed and those take many months to fullfill. Vendors also had to have some sort of buffer so they had to stockpile chips. A lot of Chinese companies vastly increased their orders to have like a year extra chip stock. So there was a massive churn. Of course you can't buy a p50 anymore because over a year has passed by now. Then there was SMIC getting put into the sanctions list and having to change their plans more than once. The industry was expecting a lot of production capacity which never actually came online because of these manufacturing tool cuts to SMIC. For example do you think TSMC would have needed to expand 28nm production capacity had SMIC been allowed to expand properly? Even TSMC wanted to increase 16nm production capacity in China but had to stop it because the US threatened sanctions.
A lot of industries adjusted their production schedules way down. When COVID-19 happened they thought people wouldn't drive to work and they would have reduced income so they wouldn't buy cars. The whole expectation of production was massively ramped down. Once you ramp it down you can't easily ramp it back up. It takes many months. The semiconductor shortages were just one unexpected side effect for them. Another thing. It isn't easy to move a chip between different factories because each factory typically has its own production process. To change production process you need to re-spin the chip and that costs many millions and months of time to validate.
Well. THAT is inflation. The money printed first flowed into the pockets of the rich and wealthy and they are snapping up any hard assets in the expectation the inflation will come. Bill Gates was one of the first when he started snapping up all the farmland he could get his grubby hands on.
It is a bunch of things. Don't oversimplify the problem. You have truck drivers in Canada complaining they can't work if they have to quarantine themselves. Then you wonder why there isn't stock.
But yes this is also a massive sign of systemic failure. Transportation and logistics in the US are breaking down. This is the thing Western economists claim doesn't happen in the market economy but only those socialist economies like the Soviet Union.
