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India wants to unseat China as the new ‘factory of the world’. But it won’t be easy
- For multinational manufacturers, the pandemic has driven home the importance of diversifying supply chains, with many now looking to India
- With its large economy and young population, India has the potential to be a manufacturing powerhouse. But its bureaucracy and red tape are infamous
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Beijing’s zero-Covid policy may just be doing what Donald Trump didn’t manage to fully achieve during his term as US president – shifting global supply chains away from China for the first time in 40 years.
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In 2018 and 2019, Trump levied stiff tariffs against China to counter what he called unfair trade deals with the United States, spurring retaliation from Beijing and kicking off a trade war.
And while many companies started discussing moving supply chains out of China as a way to distance themselves from geopolitical risks, it was really the pandemic – and China’s zero-Covid policy – that drove home the importance of not depending on one country for its supply chain.
“The geopolitical tensions in themselves may not have resulted into this level of realignment of supply chains, but Covid certainly provided that extra vision extra fillip, the extra fuel to the fire,” said Ashutosh Sharma, a research director at market research company Forrester.
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iPhone 14 delays expected after days of violent protests at Foxconn Zhengzhou factory
iPhone 14 delays expected after days of violent protests at Foxconn Zhengzhou factory
Tech giant Apple provides the latest example of being burned by an overreliance on Chinese production lines, with iPhone output hit by China’s relentless zero-Covid pursuit. Apple is now speeding up its push to shift its production out of China to other Asian countries. But where to go?
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