Rick Weddle (Site Selectors Guild): Welcome to "Site Selection Matters," where we take a closer look at the art and science of site selection decision making. I'm your host, Rick Weddle, president of the Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners, and corporate decision makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession. In this episode, we have as our guest, René Buck, CEO of BCI Global, one of the world's leading independent footprint optimization, location strategy, site selection, and supply chain consulting companies. BCI has offices in the U.S., in Europe, and in Asia.

Today, René will talk with us about increasing chances for reshoring or production from Asia to the U.S. More specifically, we'll also talk with René about what's driving this movement, and the U.S. states that are the best positioned to capture future reshoring investments. Join me as we welcome René Buck to "Site Selection Matters." René, before we get into a deep dive on this important topic, take a minute, if you will, to explain to our listeners what you mean by decentralization of production, or also called reshoring. And maybe also, a little bit about what the current drivers are of this process.

René Buck (BCI Global): Yeah, sure. We hear a lot about reshoring. And reshoring is like something which went out of the U.S. or out of Europe to China/Asia and is now supposed to come back. But let's say we prefer and, I mean, with we also our corporate clients prefer the word decentralization of manufacturing. And decentralization of manufacturing means that is the opposite of having all your eggs in one basket. You can imagine that you have a certain product, or a certain product line and you say, "Well, there's only one place on earth where I produce that." So, it's a global manufacturing plant. Then you will have regional manufacturing plants saying, "Okay. Well, this product, I produce it in a plant for Asia pack, I have a plant for North America, and I have a plant for Europe." And decentralization means even having more plants than just opposite to having one global plant.

So, we came for economies of scale reasons. A number of companies chose the last decades to say, "Well, I have one global plant who produces that product." But on the one hand, the U.S.-China trade dispute and on the other hand COVID-19 have made clear that that can be a risky and bumpy road. So, what we see is that companies are looking now into—should we not decentralize our manufacturing, so not having this product produced only in one or two plants, but the more closer to the market so that we are not that vulnerable for business disruption risk? And the reasons, the drivers behind that are there are a couple of drivers. One is from a supply chain risk perspective. You want to reduce the sourcing risk. You want to reduce the risk that you are too dependent of critical suppliers in only one single region. And let's be honest, COVID-19, certainly in February and Marc, and April made clear that supply chains all over the world were disturbed by the fact that the critical suppliers in China could not deliver anymore.

So, you have supply chain drivers in terms of mitigating sourcing risk. We have also external disruptions. We talk about pandemic. We talk about trade barrier risk. Let's not forget that for a lot of American companies, this decentralization challenge, where should we produce? What products? With what technologies? For what markets? Where? I repeat, what products do we produce? With what technologies? For what markets? Where? That's a question which for many companies, U.S.-based companies already from e