After more than a year of pandemic, industrial recovery is being hampered by numerous shortages affecting all sectors.

Companies often find themselves short of basic components and see prices soaring as subcontractors take the opportunity to increase their prices.

Nicolas Barré takes stock of a current economic issue.

This is good news: the recovery is here in the industry.

She is even almost too strong!

In so many sectors there are shortages.

Much has been said lately about the semiconductor shortages that are forcing auto factories to shut down production.

But it goes way beyond.

When we look around the companies, we realize that not a single sector is spared.

Here and there, we lack everything.

It can be packaging, wood, building foams, certain plastics and even screws or varnishes.

How is that explained?

If we remake the film, when the virus struck a year ago, companies, which had no visibility in this unprecedented crisis, first sought to preserve their cash in order to survive.

They therefore cut their orders for spare parts, raw materials, etc.

Then when the recovery started to take shape around the fall, they drew on what was left in their inventory, not knowing whether the recovery would be strong or not.

But now that business is really picking up, it often runs out of silly components.

What we call "lean management", that is to say the tight management of stocks, is very good, it saves cash.

It works as long as there is no problem in the flow of goods from one country or continent to another, as long as the suppliers are there.

Otherwise the mechanics jam and that is what is happening at the moment.

We imagine that things will eventually return to normal.

Yes, but not immediately and in the meantime, some prices are skyrocketing, subcontractors are taking advantage of this, it is normal, to increase their prices.

The prices of some types of plastics have doubled in six months.

There are tensions in steel or polypropylene, an essential resin, among others, in the automobile.

This poses a more fundamental question: our industrial fabric has aged, it has holes.

Many companies are too dependent on a handful of suppliers located at the end of the world, for lack of an alternative on our continent.

The big lesson of this crisis is that it calls for a reindustrialization of Europe.

And not just in the healthcare industries.