Everybody’s Talking About The Supply Chain

What’s the hottest new topic in American pop culture? The supply chain. What was once the invisible machine working around the clock across the globe to deliver, well everything, has taken center stage thanks to its current challenges. It’s getting twice the search traffic on Google as it was a month ago. The holiday season is coming, and while it’s not a full blown crisis for gift buyers and even buyers of everyday stuff, people are feeling the pinch. And they’re writing about it.

Consider this pair of articles from The Atlantic:

“America Is Running Out of Everything”

The optimistically titled

“Stop Shopping”

And The Onion has a great take here.

It’s easy to see why Americans are interested, numbers like this create their own drama:

• Reserving a container of books, big enough for about 35,000 cost $2500 pre-pandemic. Now the going rate is $25,000
• It costs six times as much money to send a parcel from Shanghai to Los Angeles as it does Los Angeles to Shanghai due receiving bottlenecks in the US.
• Ocean freight rates to send a container from China to the US West Coast have risen from $3847 at this time last year to around $17,377 today.
• We are short 60,000 truck drivers with approximately 150 cargo ships waiting to unload at the Port of Los Angeles
• As the author points out, a lot of common things are hard to get, whether or not you can track it with a statistic or not.

 It’s not just that overseas factories have had to close or slow production thanks to the Delta variant of COVID-19. Or the shortage of containers, of drivers, and a wild imbalance between inbound and outbound traffic. It’s that this is all happening at a time when Americans are spending money at record rates.

It’s almost a trope to discuss all the ways Americans working from suddenly decided that it was time for a Peloton, a new deck, and getting very into upgrading their interior spaces–after all, that’s where we were spending most of our time: at home, as the supply chain crumbled around us for the first time in recent memory. We’ve never experienced sustained shortages like this. Amazon is out of 15-23% of, well, everything.

What’s Next For Electronics Manufacturers? 

So what does this all mean to those of us in the electronics supply chain? 

It’s pretty safe to say that global demand isn’t going to disappear or wane significantly, so this is a great opportunity to look at your organization and its processes, to see where there’s room for improvement. 

Supplyframe Commodity IQ, a new solution launched this year, helps organizations better understand the global landscape across numerous commodity categories. This dynamic approach to market intelligence is our answer to organizations and supply chains facing the mounting pressure of rising demand and ongoing component shortages. 

Because amid all this attention, there’s never been a better time to be the strongest link in the chain that brings happiness and security to homes everywhere. Take control of your supply chain and obtain the visibility you need to make smarter sourcing decisions.