The scarcity of important intermediate products and rising prices are affecting companies and consumers around the world.
Consumer demand is particularly high during the Christmas season, while the industry struggles to be able to deliver.
Mark Fehr
Editor in business.
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According to the Euler Hermes credit insurance company, these tensions will continue to occupy the global economy until summer 2022.
"We estimate that around 4 percent of goods traded worldwide are currently stuck due to bottlenecks in shipping," says Ana Boata, Head of Economic Research at Euler Hermes.
China in particular forms a bottleneck because the local zero-covid policy affects logistics.
There is probably no end to globalization
According to Euler Hermes, many companies have recognized that hamsters will not help against the crisis and are too expensive. "Most companies will gradually return to just-in-time warehousing simply because of cost efficiency," expects Milo Bogaerts, CEO of Euler Hermes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Just in time is a paradigm that emerged during globalization, according to which companies have very low stocks or no stocks at all.
Instead, they can be supplied with pre-products exactly when the manufacturers need them. According to Bogaerts, there is currently a lot of talk about reshoring or nearshoring, but only a few concrete projects can be seen. This means: instead of ordering from suppliers in their area or manufacturing preliminary products themselves, companies continue to order from suppliers in global markets.
If you ask around from other experts, a similar picture emerges. "The shortage has even worsened, some materials are not even available", reports Andreas Baader from the management consultancy Genpact. This would be exacerbated by the fact that many companies, if possible, bought more than they needed in order to build up reserves. From the point of view of Kerstin Hoppe from Thyssenkrupp Materials Services, however, building up stocks is not a suitable recipe for the shortage.
The company is the largest materials dealer in the western world with 250,000 international customers and a seismograph for the global economy. Although it recently opened a large logistics center in Rotenburg Wümme with an area of 36,000 square meters, the project was planned long before the material crisis. "Overall, we are even reducing inventories because we can control them better," says Hoppe. Their motto is: data replace tonnage. That means: With digital networking of suppliers and buyers, the supply chain can be made transparent. This enables companies to identify bottlenecks early on and react quickly.
Lars-Peter Häfele from the management consultancy Inverto also observes that companies deal with material shortages very differently.
Individuals have said goodbye to the outsourcing paradigm and produced important preliminary products themselves. However, according to Häfele, replenishment can also be secured if manufacturers broaden their supply chains instead of relying on a single supplier or country of origin.