Chokepoints All the Way Down: What the Semiconductor Supply Chain Teaches Everyone Else
Neon makes up 0.0018% of the Earth’s atmosphere. It is captured as a byproduct of steel production — most efficiently by the air-separation units attached to older steel mills, of the kind that happened to be concentrated in Ukraine. Before 2022, Ukraine supplied roughly 70% of the world’s neon and about 90% of the semiconductor-grade […]
Dumped Milk and Empty Shelves: The Three Ways Agri-Food Supply Chains Break
In the spring of 2020, two things were true at the same time in the United States. Supermarkets were rationing dairy — in many chains, customers could buy no more than two dairy products per trip. And dairy farmers were pouring fresh milk into lagoons and drains, instructed by their own cooperatives to dump it, […]
Your Supply Chain Is a Set of Decisions Someone Made Without You
The call usually comes after. Ours came from a major Central European cement producer. Their white cement depended on kaolin sourced from Eastern Ukraine — a supply arrangement that had worked well for years, right up until the war made it stop working entirely. Production was suddenly exposed. They needed alternative sources, matched to demanding […]