Photo: DP World

Late Friday 10 November, Australia’s largest port operator, DP World, suffered a serious cyber-attack. To minimise the impact of the attack, it shut down its connection to the internet, causing considerable disruption to port operations. It is gradually restoring operations, but could suffer additional pain due to industrial action.

“Even if DP World recovers from the cyberattack to full operations shortly, GuardianAustralia understands customers remain frustrated at the prospect of delays due to protected industrial action from dock workers in coming days.”

One of the largest container ships in the world has been partially refloated after it ran aground in the Suez canal, causing a huge jam of vessels at either end of the vital international trade artery.

"This has been a really strong evolution going from the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, to take fat out of the supply chain, to tighten down everything," says supply-chain management expert Rich Weissman. He says in the past 10 years companies have come to "really rely on analytics to fine-tune supply chains to make sure that supply and demand absolutely line up". "And that's where I think we've gone too far.”

The heavy dependence on China across industry verticals is an obvious example of the sole-sourced nature of today’s supply chains.

The latest EY attractiveness survey - which examines the performance and perceptions of European countries as a destination for foreign direct investment (FDI), revealed that post-COVID-19 there will be an additional lens front and centre: the need to juggle cost and resiliency.

Coronavirus-driven supply chain disruptions are having cash flow implications for the US protein sector due to increased operating costs and less efficient plants, Fitch Ratings says.

At the recent G20 Finance Ministers meeting in Riyadh, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire — a staunch advocate of deepening economic integration — posed a question which just a few years ago would have seemed inconceivable:

‘Do we want to still depend at the level of 90 per cent or 95 per cent on the supply chain of China for the automobile industry, for the drug industry, for the aeronautical industry or do we draw the consequences of that situation to build new factories, new productions, and to be more independent and sovereign?

That’s not protectionism — that’s just the necessity of being sovereign and independent from an industrial point of view’