A new analysis, which was derived from EventWatchAI from Resilinc, looked at the top drivers of supply chain disruptions for 2024. The data revealed that overall disruptions to global supply chains increased 38% from the previous year.
The top five disruptions for 2024 include:
- FactoryfFires
- Labor disruption
- Business sale
- Leadership transition
- Mergers & Acquisitions
Factory fires maintained their position as the number one disruption for the sixth consecutive year, with 2,299 disruption alerts issued. Fortunately, this number is down 20% from the previous year and has declined 36% from the record high in 2022.
Labor disruptions made it into the top five list for the second year in a row, jumping up to the second spot with a 47% year-over-year increase. Labor issues played a major role in impacting most industries in the U.S. and globally, including company and site-level strikes, national strikes, labor protests, and layoffs. From the ILA U.S. port strike, impacting over 47,000 workers, and the Canadian rail strike to major layoffs at tech giants Intel, Dell, and Amazon, labor disruptions continued its streak as a key risk area for 2024.
Financial risk areas, including business sales, leadership transitions, and mergers and acquisitions, rounded out the top five disruptions for 2024. While business sales climbed a steady 17% YoY, leadership transitions surged 95% last year. Several notable transitions included leadership changes at Boeing, Nestlé, Pfizer Limited, and Intel. While mergers and acquisitions saw a slight decline of 5%, they remained a top disruption for 2024.
Though the number of disruption alerts increased overall, several risk areas experienced substantial year-over-year increases; for example, extreme weather jumped a dramatic 119%. Consistent with this trend, flood-related alerts surged by 214%, forest fires increased by 88%, and hurricanes/typhoons jumped by 101%, underscoring the growing impact of extreme weather risks.
Other noteworthy trends highlighted in the data include a 146% rise in labor violations such as forced labor, poor working conditions, and health and safety violations, among others. Geopolitical risk alerts climbed 123% after a brief dip in 2023, and protests/riots saw an astounding 285% year-over-year increase, marking the largest growth increase of all risk events tracked.
Regulatory change alerts, which include tariffs, changes in laws, environmental regulations, and bans, continued their upward trend with a 128% year-over-year increase.
The five most disrupted industries included Life Sciences, Healthcare, General Manufacturing, High Tech, and Automotive, marking the fourth year in a row that these particular industries have been the most impacted.
Of all the 22,522 EventWatchAI notifications sent, more than half (59%) were impactful enough to trigger the creation of a WarRoom—virtual platforms in the Resilinc dashboard where customers and their suppliers communicate and collaborate to assess and resolve disruptions—emphasizing that disruptions not only increased in 2024 but also had a heightened impact on global supply chains.
