Samsung gives China wide berth over coronavirus woes, uses sea and air freight to ship smartphone bits to Vietnamese factories The coronavirus epidemic continues to disrupt China's manufacturing and logistics sectors, forcing smartphone manufacturers to adapt. Among them this is South Korean tech giant Samsung, which has begun shipping smartphone components to Vietnam by air and sea, where two-thirds of its handsets are now being assembled. China and …
Vietnam also celebrates the Lunar New Year - Tet - so will have had a corresponding, although slightly shorter, holiday.
There, as in China, it is customary to return to the family home for the festival, and a similar migration to the cities has taken place.
So, components stocks might dwindle more quickly than some would expect.
Wow. I had no idea that the consequences could be so widespread. In retrospect though, yeah, basing a big chunk of your production capacity in the same country is asking for trouble when things like this crop up.
I guess this is going to be a wake-up call for quite a few industries. From now on, companies will need to diversify their production centers and not only implant in countries with cheap labor. From time to time, having a site in a less-cheap country will be useful to pick up the slack when the cheap country has a hiccup like this.
I'll let the MBA's find the right balance for this.
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