Inventory up, Japanese cars still rare - This Week in Supply Chain Management (27 / 2011)

This week has been filled with work on my dissertation, I nearly finished my first chapter. But I have a long flight on Saturday, and so I have some time to fill.

News

• Inventory levels at semiconductor suppliers seem to be rising, with memory components up by nearly 15% (iSuppli via Circuits Assembly)
• Australians seem to love Japanese cars, since car sales in June fell over 10 percent due to the Japanese disruption. GM seems to be one of the winners with a market share of 13% in June (Reuters)
• The Supply Chain Council just announced the agenda for their Executive Summit North America – Reinventing Supply Chain Strategy for Performance and Risk (SCC)

Blogs

• Seeking Alpha takes a look at the monthly report by the ISM (Institute for Supply Management) and ponders about the implications for growth and investment (Seeking Alpha)
• Mining Weekly has an interview on how to mitigate risks in Africa (Mining Weekly)
• I did not know that they still existed, but Psion is still alive… and reports problems with its supply chain leading to a huge drop in the stock price. (Financial Times)
• Risk management can be a competitive advantage, a study by Accenture finds (@Risk)

Research

• The World Trade Magazine and the University of Tennessee conducted a survey on current supply chain trends. The results indicate that supply risk management is still in an quite early phase (WT 100)
• Jan Husdal reviews a dissertation on the risk issues of low cost sourcing in Turkey and China (Jan Husdal)

If you haven’t read my articles of this week, have a look at the following:

• Monday: I answered a simple question: What’s better, single sourcing or dual sourcing? It depends, of course!
• Wednesday: This week I especially liked my discovery of Flipboard, an iPad application for reading online content I described here.

Enjoy your weekend, next week I’ll be posting from Bangkok.