All STRAT listeners:

It is with great sadness we must mention that this is one of the last podcasts recorded with my co-host, close friend and professional colleague Mark Mansfield. Unexpectedly and suddenly, Mark passed away on December 24th. We are all grappling with this enormous loss but are proud that we can still share his wisdom, insight, and great sense of humor once again.

-Hal Kempfer

On this episode...

Targeted/strategic decoupling (also called de-risking) to areas of manufacturing and supply chains. Building on our September discussions about Securing Strategic Sourcing as well as Making Manufacturing a Means of Mitigation, we now must calculate the macro-impact of October 7, 2023 events, and that we are now in a brave new world that must be readdressed. Latin America as our resource (commodities) rich southern neighbor with strategic linkage to Fortress North America (FNA). The 2000’s commodities boom (‘pink tide’ left wing governments) was followed by a blue tide that we must understand. Other global power houses including China and Russia are looking to South America to replicate the ‘African Strategy’/Belt and Road 2 to lock down strategic supply sources and challenge the West. 

Chip Wars – American sanctions of advanced semiconductors and manufacturing equipment in 2020 were designed to stop tech transfer to China. Now see the Huawei Mate 60 Pro with its Kirin 9000S chip (made by SMIC) – which is equivalent to Samsung’s Galaxy S20 – (manufactured by Taiwan TSMC in 2020). They had successfully created a 5G smartphone despite these sanctions — what does this mean? Mark and Hal tackle this enormous challenge to the global supply chain and discuss better ways we can prepare and mitigate the threat this poses to our critical supply chains.