Re:Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of...
by jandrese on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @03:35PM
(#22549605)
If your supply chain encompasses two countries then a disruption in either country will take you offline. If you keep everything in-house you only have to worry about one country.
You can also harden your supply chain by having multiple suppliers in different countries, so a loss of any one isn't an issue. For something like Covid-19 it's near impossible to avoid disruption, but for less-global outbreaks it can be a winning strategy.
Re:Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of...
by hef19898 on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @03:44PM
(#22549702)
Only in the case epidemics or natural disasters. And even then I would argue that's nit the case. E.g. there was a major accident in a Chinese chemical park last year, it closed down for the majority of the year. This park manufactured the raw materials for stuff like car lights, the glasses of them. It also was the only source. Did anybody outside the industry suffer any results? No, because supply chains actually adopt pretty well to stuff like that. What would happen so, if everything is in one place is higher costs off-crisis, you wouldn't survive economically to see a crisis that way.
Recovery is key, so. And that is where we will see which companies did their jobs supply chain wise and which didn't.
Re:Coronavirus has disrupted supply chains for nearly 75% of...
by twblalock on Wednesday March 11, 2020 @05:03PM
(#22550576)
> If your supply chain encompasses two countries then a disruption in either country will take you offline. If you keep everything in-house you only have to worry about one country.
Yeah but you'd also have all your eggs in one basket.
One day there might be a pandemic which affects the West but not China, which would make outsourcing supply chains look pretty smart. You are drawing a general conclusion based on the circumstances of a single, rare event.
Besides, where is the suicide of the west here? The west has benefitted from this arrangement for decades. The west is better off with this arrangement than it would have been without it, and this pandemic would have happened anyway, and it would have disrupted supply chains anyway.
I have not yet seen any evidence that lack of western manufacturing capability has made this pandemic worse. However, there is a massive body of economic knowledge that tells us that exploiting comparative advantage increases wealth.