The Fragile Supply Chain: Manufacturing in an Era of Uncertainty
Dr. Lee Elliott recaps the highlights from a recent panel about supply chains at the CoreNet Global Summit in Singapore, chaired by Knight Frank
5 minutes to read
In today's interconnected global economy, supply chains represent a critical vulnerability that too often remains unaddressed until disruption strikes. During the recent CoreNet Global Summit in Singapore, I highlighted Tim Minshall's timely new book Your Life is Manufactured, which offers essential insights into how global manufacturing processes actually work—how they move, falter, and ultimately impact businesses worldwide. Minshall understands what many of us prefer to ignore: the distance between the things we need and the places that make them is vast, and that distance carries risk.
We talk about the supply chain as if it were some abstract force, a distant hum of cargo ships and factory lines, but it is neither of those things. It is not distant at all. It is the cup of coffee you hold in your hand, the screen you are reading this on. It is the 15,000–30,000 components in your car, the six million in an airliner, the shipping container rolling silently into a port halfway across the world, waiting for a crane, a truck, and a warehouse. It is fragile and invisible; when it fails, everything stops.
The Illusion of Efficiency
For decades, we were told that lean manufacturing was the answer. Cutting costs and streamlining production was a triumph of modern industry. We believed this, even as our factories disappeared and our ability to make atrophied in favour of an ability to buy. We built supply chains so efficient they could be disrupted by the slightest tremor. And then they were.
It started with empty shelves. The COVID-19 pandemic was a slow-motion unravelling of everything the global economy had taken for granted. At first, it was masks, gloves, hand sanitiser. Then, it was semiconductors, car parts, and furniture. Factories shut down. Ports clogged with stranded containers. Shipping costs surged tenfold. The cracks were no longer theoretical. They were everywhere, exposing how little redundancy had been built into a system designed for cost, not resilience.
Then, as if to make the point unmistakably clear, the Ever Given wedged itself sideways in the Suez Canal in March 2021. For six days, $10 billion in global trade sat motionless every single day. Some ships turned around. Some went the long way round. Some waited. And the rest of the world, for the first time in a long time, looked at a single supply chain failure and saw not an abstraction but something very real.
There is a kind of arrogance to globalisation, an unspoken belief that things will continue to move simply because they always have. But lean manufacturing, it turns out, was a misnomer. Lean meant vulnerable. Lean meant sending Scottish fish to China for processing, then shipping them back to British supermarkets because somewhere in an algorithm, that made sense.
A System of Contradictions
Shanghai moves more containers than the top five U.S. ports combined. China produces one-third of the world’s manufactured goods, 70 million bicycles a year, more than three-quarters of the global supply. And yet, in terms of manufacturing output per person, Switzerland and Singapore rank higher—two economies that have not abandoned production in favour of services, that understand the interplay between making and moving and consuming.
An iPhone travels 250,000 kilometres before it reaches a customer. That distance is not a metaphor. It is six times around the Earth, the reason disruptions ripple outward in ways we still struggle to grasp. Add refrigeration—cold chain logistics, the delicate dance of keeping products at precise temperatures across thousands of miles—and the complexity deepens. Everything, all of it, requires energy. Unilever found a way to make ice cream stable at -12°C instead of -18°C, cutting freezer energy use by 25%. One small shift. A massive impact.
The Collapse of Industrial Memory
Harvard researchers Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih call it the industrial commons—the tacit knowledge, the infrastructure, the ability to make that disappears when a country offshores too much, for too long. And once it’s gone, it does not come back easily.
The United States and the United Kingdom once believed they could shift to service economies and that manufacturing was a relic of the past. But the 2008 financial crisis cracked that illusion. Then came the pandemic, a slow-motion realisation that resilience had been traded for short-term profits somewhere along the way. Today, reshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring - words that barely existed a decade ago - are at the forefront of policy discussions. There is no easy way to unwind globalisation, no simple way to repair what was lost.
And so the conversation shifts.
The Environmental Reckoning
Manufacturing is not only about efficiency. It is about impact. Cement production alone accounts for 8% of global CO₂ emissions—four times the emissions of the entire aviation industry. Six billion tonnes of food are produced annually, yet 2.5 billion tonnes go unused.
There is a way to fix this or at least mitigate it. Move less. Transport less. Slow down. If container ships reduced their speed by 20%, carbon emissions would drop by 34%. But modern consumers, trained to expect speed and convenience, may not be willing to wait. The most challenging shift may not be technological but psychological.
The Reckoning Ahead
The supply chain is no longer a quiet, unseen mechanism. It is no longer a given. Every shock—pandemics, trade wars, geopolitical tension—has made that clear.
For years, cost was king. Companies chased the lowest price, the most efficient route, and the slimmest margins. But now, resilience is emerging as the new priority. And in that shift, corporate real estate leaders will find themselves at the centre of the response. Warehouses are no longer just storage; they are strategic assets that need to be closer to consumers, more flexible, and more sustainable. Manufacturing hubs must be reimagined, balancing just-in-time efficiency with just-in-case preparedness.
For CRE leaders tasked with navigating this new landscape, Minshall’s Your Life is Manufactured is not just a useful read but an essential one because the world is changing. Because the next disruption is always on the horizon. Because the spaces where we make and move are just as critical as the products themselves.