We had a meeting that was interested in disasters events out of nowhere - the real black swans. There are a number of civilization enders, but apart from full exchange nuclear war, the probability of any happening seems very small. But a few percent of a population would cause serious damage beyond the grief. A lot has been written about how Japan mostly came back after the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster as well as citing how smaller disasters in Taiwan and China could be "routed around."
This is something worth thinking about. Supply chains may involve a lot of locations but they aren't interchangeable. Some require specialist areas .. a region in China may have a dozen flexible suppliers you can use and they might be able to fulfill your orders promptly, but what happens if the region shuts down? Does your company have non-regional backup suppliers?
Tech in Korea and China have these very specialized regions. A scenario my wife keeps bringing up is a pandemic (she has some expertise having worked on SARS in 2003) - what if we had a repeat of something like the 1918 Spanish flu? Or what if something even deadlier could transmit as easily? People have made simulations and it isn't pretty. A responsible government would probably move to a large scale quarantine and that could easily last a month or more. How would those events propagate through the supply system not be mention demand?
I brought this up at the meeting, but people didn't see it as a major issue noting supply chains are very flexible and modern medicine.
I'm not so sure supply chains are that resilient. Particularly when human lives and emotions are involved. And epidemiologists talk about twenty percent probabilities for a pandemic in a decade - the sort of event where we don't have resources other than quarantines.
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