Global supply chains are again in focus, for an odd reason. A ship is stuck in the Suez Canal.
The situation won’t likely have a lasting impact, but it demonstrates the vulnerability of companies’ global supply chains, an issue they have been grappling with since the onset of the pandemic. Supply-chain management is getting harder, creating new risks, and even greater opportunities, for industrial stocks.
Suez, a shortcut through Egypt from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, is one of the most important canals on the globe. It makes it possible to travel by sea from the Middle East and Asia to Europe without sailing around Africa, slashing shipping times and costs.Thousands of ships and more than a billion tons of cargo pass through the canal each year.
The Suez situation will likely be resolved without too much delay, although engineers appear to still be figuring out how. Yet the episode still illustrates how difficult it is becoming to manage far-flung global supply chains.
Supply chains have been a big topic of discussion for investors and management teams during the pandemic. Factories around the world have had to shut down, or seek expensive air delivery of parts, as waves of lockdowns elsewhere have interrupted deliveries. At the same time, demand for health-related goods took off, while sales of other products made by some of the same companies sagged, forcing purchasing managers to reallocate resources on the fly.
Honeywell International (ticker: HON), for example, opened 10 manufacturing sites to make masks and sensors for ventilators. “We had to contract in aerospace,” said Torsten Pilz, the company’s supply-chain chief. “We got experience in doing things fast.”
The industrial conglomerate has a prominent aerospace business, among other operations.
“2020 was exceptionally challenging from a supply chain perspective,”General Electric(ticker: GE) CEO Larry Culp told Barron’s in a recent interview. “In our own facilities as well as the supply base.” Culp, is using lean management techniques—a statistical approach to problem solving—to improve all aspects of GE’s operations, including supply-chain management.
“Organizationally, we were OK,” said Honeywell’sPilz, reflecting on the difficulties of 2020. “We had reduced the number of factories and distribution centers. On top of that, we set up a supply chain that was more or less regional.”
“More or less regional” is turning into a theme within industry. The concept also comes up in talk of reshoring, or a “make where you sell” paradigm.
In the early part of the decade, many industrial businesses chased the lowest labor costs and simply shipped products around the world. But even before the pandemic, the model was breaking down a little as wages rose in places such as China, and as trade barriers started to pop up. Covid-19 accelerated that trend.
Bank of America industrial analyst Andrew Obin, who has been tracking reshoring data points for months, wrote about another example on Thursday. “Intel announced $20 [billion] investment to build two U.S. semiconductor fab plants,” wrote Obin in a research report, adding that the Intel (INTC) news follows announcements by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) and Samsung (005930. Korea).
The amount of money coming back into the U.S. as a result of the shift is enough to move the needle for U.S. makers of industrial equipment, he said. “The offshoring of U.S. tech was the biggest driver of flattish real U.S. manufacturing output since 2000,” Obin said. Intel’s announcement represents a step toward reversing that.
For investors in industrial stocks, reshoring is another small positive factor driving improving results. Also on the list are the improving global economy and the opportunity to digitize all the data that industrial machinery generates, to offer better customer service and new products.
Obin sees the reshoring trend helping some stocks he rates at Buy, including Parker-Hannifin (PH),Rockwell Automation (ROK), Eaton (ETN), Fortive (FTV),Emerson Electric (EMR), and PTC (PTC).
Those six stocks are up about 35%, on average, over the past six months, better then the 20% comparable gains of both the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average.The reshoring-related stocks are also outpacing other industrial stocks. Industrial components of the S&P 500 are up about 25% over the same span.
Obin believes the reshoring theme has legs. Even though technologies such as Zoom have effectively shrunk the globe, making it possible to talk to anyone, anywhere, any time, goods still need to be produced and consumed in a physical locations.
The problem with the Suez Canal highlights how it can be better to do that closer to home.