Navigating geopolitical disruptions: managerial trade-offs in global supply chain reconfiguration - The case study of Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions

This thesis examines how multinational companies reconfigure their supply chains in response to geopolitical disruptions, and what trade-off managers have to handle with. Over the past decade, geopolitical disruption from Brexit, to Covid-19, to war in Ukraine have exposed the fragility of the global value chain, focus on efficiency-optimized supply networks, pushing company to reconsider their supply chain design, production logistics and main sourcing. Starting from this backgrund, the thesis investigates the managerial trade-off that arise when companies have to balance benefits and sacrifices of each decision, attempting to reconcile efficiency vs resilience, agility vs cost, redundancy vs flexibility. The central research question asks how managers weigh and resolve these trade-offs when they reconfigure their supply chain to face actual geopolitical disruption and uncertainty. Empirically, the thesis develops an in-depth case study of Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions (FHCS), tracing how the company's supply chain configuration evolved before and after recent geopolitical shocks. and reconstructing the decision-making process behind its reconfiguration choices. At the end, a decision trade model is built to replicate the sequence of trade-offs managers navigate in practice.