Supply Chain Resilience Tested by Coronavirus

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The 2011 tsunami in Japan was one of the forces behind the electronics supply chain’s dedication to resilience – the ability to shift all or part of a supply chain as needed. That means people, materials, manufacturing lines, suppliers and even physical processing and aid centers. Global businesses now have entire departments dedicated to business continuity.

Nevertheless, experts predict the supply chain disruption from China’s coronavirus outbreak could last three to six months. The city of Wuhan,  ground zero for the outbreak, is an important, global economic hub. Wuhan’s GDP reached $213 billion as of 2018 as the region moved to high-end manufacturing – everything from chip making to biomedicine, according to Bindiya Vakil, CEO of supply chain solutions provider Resilinc. Half of the Fortune 500 businesses have operations in that region.

“Optoelectronics, semiconductors, chemical, life sciences and many of China’s advanced chip manufacturing plants are in Whuan,” Vakil said on a recent webinar. “We do expect NAND flash memory to have capacity constraints, and there are other notable manufacturers such as Foxconn and Jabil there.”

Read the complete article from Barbara Jorgensen at EET Asia>>