Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Friday, February 5th,

and this is your FT News Briefing.

The global auto industry is hurting from a shortage of computer chips,

and so German car makers are trying to come up with a workaround.

Meanwhile, company directors in the UK could face personal liability for their company's accounting,

and nursing homes in Japan use lots of robots.

The FT's Leo Lewis explains how they're actually bringing economic benefits to the aging

society. I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

We've been talking a lot about how the pandemic has disrupted global supply chains.

Car makers are really feeling that pain. Across the auto industry, productions have been cut,

and workers have been furloughed. Now German car makers are considering an overhaul of their

supply chain. The FT's motor industry correspondent Peter Campbell has more on this. Hi, Peter.

Hi. Peter, you've been reporting on the chip shortage and how it's affecting car makers.

How bad is the chip shortage? Well, the chip shortage is pretty bad, actually, and it seems

to affect car makers all over the world. So early on in January, some of the car makers said they

were having problems getting semiconductors to go into their vehicles. It was actually causing

some of them to slow down or even have to stop production. So we've seen Nissan and Honda have

to stop production in some countries, including Honda's plant in the UK. We've seen more recently

general motors this week have to stop production. We've seen companies such as Audi, and even Ford,

we saw had to slow production of its F-150 flagship truck in the US because of

semi-conductor shortages. So this is a global issue and an industry wide issue.

And then the story that came out today about German car makers, what could their supply chain

...