Question

In 2000, in the facility of a New Mexico subcontractor of integrated circuits, a fire
started but was rapidly managed. Integrated components plants require highly
sterilized environment, and the fire plus the intervention compromised several months
of integrated circuits supply to Nokia. Nokia share prices drop on average by 8% due
to this accident when the company announced disruption in their supply chains. In
addition to the financial element, the rest of the supply chain has to support the strain
from replacing a supplier in a minimum amount of time. Furthermore, with wide product
ranges and multiplicity of parts, the challenges are growing every month. The lean
concept, when pushed to the extreme, could also be a cause of supply chain rupture
when an issue arises.

Answer 1

Answer:

In 2011, telephone users numbered more than 4.6 billion worldwide. Until 2010, Nokia was the market leader with 29 percent of total market share, and it is still the leader in emerging economies such as China and India. Apple recently took first place in terms of revenue. In 2010, 1.6 billion cell phones were sold, a net increase of 37 percent from 2009, and 250 million handsets were delivered in the first quarter of 2011. Nokia, a Finish company, originated in the mid-19th century as a paper manufacturer. The conglomerate expanded into the elec­tronics sector in the 1960s and finally into the mobile manufacturing business in the 1980s. The company cur­rently employs more than 132,000 people in 120 coun­tries, conducts business in more than 150 countries, and has annual revenues of $42 billion and operational prof­its of $2 billion. Over the past 30 years, the industrial outsourcing trend has stretched manufacturing facilities from in-house production of almost all components to global sourcing, keeping in house only the design and the assembling of final products.

With customers all over the world and suppliers from the United States to China, Nokia faces challenges in the operation of its supply chain and sometimes has some difficult choices to make.