The Supply Chain Is Flat

strategy +  business (Prasso) - William Fung, the head of an old and very large Hong Kong trading company, on making and selling products in a vastly altered global landscape.

William Fung, Li & Fung’s managing director, calls his company’s recent record “flat-world success”: the old-fashioned infrastructure is gone, replaced by fluid networks that can design, manufacture, and distribute almost anything, anywhere, and on any timetable. That strategy has transformed a company that began life in 1906 as a trading outfit for Chinese silks, porcelain, and tea in Canton (now Guangzhou) into a US$14 billion organization, the focus of seven Harvard Business School case studies. Fung and his brother, Victor (who is chairman of Li & Fung), coauthored Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World (Wharton School Publishing, 2007). Recently, William Fung discussed with strategy+business his ideas about new rules of supply chain management and the impact on global sourcing of Chinese factories, consumers, and currency policies.