American freight intelligence repository Resilinc has found in its latest Event Watch Report that incidents of risk to supply chain efficiency, and the resultant cargo disruption, spiked by 36% in 2018. According to the California-based think-tank, the rate of event notification it received reached about seven a day, totalling 2 696 for the year. Fires, production plant explosions, warehouse accidents, natural disasters, cyber threats, governance disruption in the form of tariffs, quality failures and recalls stemming from consumer-related interest shifts – all of these contributed to a worsening global supply chain risk profile. Supply chain writer Bob Trebilcock writes that “companies in a major crisis take a 5 to 50% hit to their stock price”. And if you ply your trade in a zone affected by a natural disaster, even if it’s just a moderate smack by Mother Nature, you may find your business among the 20% of commercial and industrial concerns about to go bang in 15 to 18 months. If you’re lucky to escape that figure, he adds, your operation may still be among the 15% of companies that crash in the first three years after a calamity. The rising weariness of disruptions to the industry is one of the reasons why Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium is no longer even bothering to gauge fear of the unforeseen among attendees at its regular conferences – because risk has become all – pervasive. One of the consortium’s founders, Greg Schlegel, told Trebilcock that over the organisation’s 10-year lifespan, conference attendees would be asked to raise their hands about how worried they were that risk could disrupt supply chain efficiency. In the past, about four to five attendees out of 25 or so people at these conferences would raise their hands. But the consortium has stopped asking the same risk-based question “because all the attendees raise their hands”, Trebilcock says. Given the portents of supply chain disruption, the Association of Supply Chain Management in Chicago teamed up with the Supply Chain Management Review in Massachusetts to conduct a survey to establish how risk affects companies and their shareholder value. What the survey found is startling and confirms why Schlegel’s consortium doesn’t bother conducting its risk-fearing show-of-hands exercises anymore. The survey found, for example, that 75% of respondents said most incidents of supply chain disruption had occurred last year, compared to 2% for the year before and 1% for the years prior to 2017. Of course, that shows an alarming rise of risk incidents within a short time. Moreover, the steep curve of supply chain jitters seems set to intensify in the run-up to Brexit, when the UK will most likely effect a much-feared no-deal divorce from its freetrade allies in Europe. That the EU will exit relatively unscathed is also not a given, despite general perceptions that Brexit is a British decision, with consequences to be borne mostly by Britain. As for 2019, the survey’s respondents said the year has been riven with risk, with 42% of incidents occurring in the first quarter, 32% in Q2 and 22% so far in Q3. When it came to the type of risk experienced, 27% of respondents cited geopolitical events, 15% mentioned the loss of a supplier, 8% blamed natural disasters and 4% cited financial or legal issues. Also, consider this: as news broke last week about the US and Saudi Arabia accusing Iran of having orchestrated drone attacks on Saudi oil installations, just imagine how that geopolitical percentage of 27% might differ if the survey was conducted again.