This is a record of an interview with Victor Fung who is a chairman of the Li & Fung, which is said as “Hong Kong based multinational trading company”in his words. As the title, the interview focused on “Supply Chain Management” and demonstrates its importance for global company in twenty-first century dates back to the Li & Fung’s history.
The Li & Fung’s started as an interpreter and a broker which mediated businesses between Chinese factories and American merchants. However, the fee of intermediate became squeezed and it has started to change the business model in three stages.
In the first stage, it became “a regional sourcing agent”, which tells buyers when and where they should start buying. This is valuable for buyers because exports were controlled by government with quotas and information of other country is complex. In the second stage, it became “a manager and deliverer of manufacturing programs”; not introduce best provider of ready-made products, but organize production process of new goods. In the third stage, it expand second model globally and started “dispersed manufacturing”, not construct whole value-chain but separate and integrate parts of it.
This is different type of global company, which does not own value-chain but “configure” and “coordinate” them. I think it seems similar to Japanese governments because they want to control industries they taking charge of and collect more information about the industry than any other.
URL:http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=177167
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