A worldwide shortage of chips is painful for downstream industries but means profits for chipmakers.

BYD Semiconductor Co, a semiconductor company owned by US billionaire Warren Buffett-backed BYD, sent a notice letter to its customers on June 15, saying it decided to raise prices of IPM and IGBT single-tube products by no less than 5 percent from July 1, 2021, ijiwei.com reported on Monday.

BYD Semiconductor said this is due to the rising cost of products due to tight upstream production capacity and upward price adjustments from suppliers.

To ensure the continuous supply of products, the company decided to increase the prices of some products, with in-transit and undelivered orders following the new prices, the notification letter in the report showed.

BYD Semiconductor was established in October 2004 and entered the industrial microcontroller unit (MCU) field in 2007, ranking first in China in terms of market share of industrial-grade touch MCUs.

BYD Semiconductor then extended its business from industrial-grade MCUs across to automotive MCUs and launched the first generation of 8-bit automotive MCUs in 2018 and the first generation of 32-bit automotive MCUs in 2019, with batch loading in BYD's full range of models.

BYD Semiconductor's automotive and industrial-grade MCU chips have exceeded 2 billion in cumulative shipments to date, it previously said.

BYD announced on May 11 that its board of directors agreed to spin off its controlling subsidiary BYD Semiconductor Co Ltd to ChiNext, a NASDAQ-style subsidiary of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, for listing.