Over the past few years, we’ve spoken with hundreds of hardware startups, and there’s one phrase that has been showing up in almost every interview: “supply chains.”
They were always important for people shipping physical products, of course, but the pandemic and the international logistics chaos that resulted from it made the pain of getting components to factories and products from factories to warehouses, then to stores and to customers, all the more present.
A few of the founders TechCrunch spoke to at CES in Las Vegas this year seemed to be optimistic, saying that some of the supply-chain crisis is on its way to being resolved, while others laughed at the suggestion that all of this is behind us. We decided to find out what the status is.
I spoke with supply-chain experts Fictiv to figure out whether the light at the end of the tunnel is daylight or the headlights of an oncoming train. ...
