Having Products Made In Developing Countries

I have written recently about the problems of having product made and shipped from factories in China, The Philippines and India. These problems include labor strife and labor shortages, lack of shipping containers and slow and increasingly costly ocean shipping. We can now add to this list, severe weather and disasters caused by inadequate facilities and developing country infrastructure.

What do I mean by these terms? Well we have recently had several shipments delayed by typhoons, which is what they call hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean. It appears that their typhoon season is earlier than our hurricane season in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Thus our factories in the Philippines have recently shut down to ride out the storms and clean up after. Fortunately, they seem to handle this well.

Another of our factories, in the middle of a major city, has just burned to the ground. We surmise that a combination of old, unsprinklered buildings which resembled a rabbit warren, working with combustible materials and indifferent municipal fire fighting services, usually reserved for those who pay, resulted in the complete loss of the production facility.

Fortunately, the factory owners are an organized and resilient group and have promised to rebuild for next season. The good thing for us is that our shipment from them is on the water and will be delivered to our warehouse next week. International supply chains may be less expensive than producing in the US (although that may change for some products), but they introduce many other costs and risks