As news of the massive earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan broke a month ago, David Cox watched with horror at the devastation being wrought on millions of lives. He also felt a rising sense of trepidation about the impact of the disaster on his business.
The head of operations at Blue Coat, a manufacturer of electronic internet equipment based near San Francisco, spent an anxious 24 hours checking on how many of his company’s worldwide supply network of more than 1,000 companies would be affected. In the end, he says: “We discovered that a few dozen of our suppliers [in Japan] could have problems in making components available to us, and found alternative sources for most of the parts.”
But he sounds less assured about what would have happened if a similar shock had hit Guangdong, the southern Chinese province that is the world’s most important electronics production centre and the site of one of Blue Coat’s two main factories. “I’m not sure what we’d do,” he says. “The only compensating factor is that all our competitors would be in the same position.”