Exclusive EventWatchAI Data Reveals Bankruptcies and Labor Disruptions Are on the Rise, but Disruptions Overall are Stabilizing

Resilinc, a leading supply chain mapping, disruption sensing, and resiliency analytics company has unveiled new data highlighting the primary drivers of supply chain disruptions during the first half of 2023. From January through June, Resilinc’s EventWatchAI platform reported a total of 8,197 supply chain disruptions, with the Healthcare, High Tech, Automotive, Aerospace, and Food & Beverage industries bearing the brunt of the impact. Notably, the overall number of disruptions is slowing compared to previous years, with a mere 3% year-over-year increase, indicating the supply chain is stabilizing.

The top ten reported disruptions in the first half of 2023 included:

• Factory Fires
• Mergers & Acquisitions
• Business Sale
• Leadership Transition
• Factory Disruption
• Legal Action
• Labor Disruption
• Cyber Attack
• Port Disruption
• Recall

While the number of disruptions overall is stabilizing and even notably decreasing in some historically high-risk areas like factory fires, other emerging financial risk areas experienced substantial year-over-year increases. Bankruptcies surged by 196%, Profit Warnings by 300%, and Corporate Restructuring by 125%.

Labor disruptions are also substantially higher this year — up an astounding 136%. This includes company and site-level strikes, national strikes (like the Labor Union strikes in France or the worker walkouts at Starbucks in the U.S.), layoffs (like this year’s job cuts at Google, PayPal, Meta, and Amazon), and labor protests, among others.

Factory disruptions, including shutdowns, production halts, warnings/citations, and labor accidents, increased by 30% year-over-year. FDA/EMA/OSHA Action saw an 82% jump, while recalls surged by 66% compared to the first half of 2022.

Financial and organizational risks such as Mergers & Acquisitions, Business Sale, and Leadership Transition remained among the top five disruptions, but displayed signs of stabilization and slight deceleration compared to the first half of 2022.

Factory fires, although still the leading supply chain disruption with 1,642 notifications in the first half of 2023, experienced a nearly 20% decline year-over-year. This reduction can be attributed to the restoration of proper maintenance and procedures following the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a decrease in production due to shifting consumer demands.

Of these reported disruptions, over half (53%) 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).

Resilinc’s data is gathered by its 24/7 global event monitoring Artificial Intelligence, EventWatchAI, which collects information and monitors news on 400 different types of disruptions across 104 million sources including traditional news sources, social media platforms, wire services, videos, and government reports. Annually, the AI contextualizes and analyzes nearly 5 billion data feeds across 100 languages and 200 countries, making EventWatchAI the industry’s largest, most comprehensive supply chain risk monitoring system on the planet.