For a week in March 2021, the 400m-long Ever Given container ship was stuck in the Suez Canal. As teams worked to free the vessel, 369 ships waited for passage through the canal, costing around \$9.6 billion in disruptions to global trade.
 
If this was a tragicomic illustration of just how fragile our global supply chains can be, then COVID-19, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the recent flooding in Pakistan serve as more serious cautionary tales.
 
These difficulties pile up. Since 2020, the price of sending a container from Asia to Europe has risen by a factor of ten, and 80% of companies report that they expect disruptions to affect their supply chains, according to a 2020 IDC whitepaper.

This trend has prompted governments around the world to increasingly look to encourage localizing production or reshoring. Whether through regulation or subsidies, there has been a political push to minimize dependency on external suppliers and trade routes. However, this would only work to a certain extent with many in-demand materials and components available from a few specific regions. 
 
Supply chain resilience is also not just about reacting to present problems. The speed of market and technological transformation means that for businesses to remain resilient, they need to keep an eye on where their sectors are going and what that means for their supply chains in the future.
 
“Developments over the next five to ten years will necessitate a massive shift in the aerospace supply chain, for example,” says David Ziegler, Vice President, Aerospace and Defense Industry. “There will need to be the sourcing of alternative suppliers for new sustainable technologies, and that means the supply chain will have to be completely reshuffled.”