Friedberg @ 00:57:15Right
economy
If international shipping delays between China and the U.S. remain at their 2022 levels, an increasing number of brands will shift production or sourcing to locations closer to their end markets (e.g., nearshoring to countries like Mexico) over the subsequent years.
brands are going to respond to shipping closer to home. So that is a trend that you're going to see more and more of. Uh, if the delays stay the way they are.View on YouTube
Explanation
Evidence since 2022 shows two key things:
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The condition (“if the delays stay the way they are”) did not hold.
- Global container schedule reliability improved strongly through 2022–2023, with Sea‑Intelligence estimating a jump from 42.6% to 62.1% and average delays falling from 6.38 to 4.83 days in 2023, i.e., congestion eased compared with the 2021–early‑2022 peak. (sea-intelligence.com) So the specific antecedent of his conditional forecast (2022‑level delays persisting) was not met.
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However, the main claim—that brands would increasingly shift production/sourcing closer to end markets (nearshoring, especially to Mexico)—did materialize.
- Mexico surpassed China as the United States’ largest goods import partner by 2023–2024; analyses attribute this shift partly to firms moving production closer to the U.S. (nearshoring) in response to supply‑chain risk, tariffs, and cost pressures. (investopedia.com)
- Nearshoring to Mexico is widely described as “booming,” with U.S., Canadian and South American companies deliberately bringing supply chains nearer to consumers and Mexico becoming a key manufacturing hub feeding the U.S. market. (supplychainbrain.com)
- Mexico’s FDI has hit record or near‑record levels since 2022, with a large share in manufacturing; government and industry reports explicitly link this inflow to nearshoring and relocation of production to serve the U.S. more directly. (mexiconewsdaily.com)
- U.S. data and Federal Reserve analysis show Mexico’s share of U.S. imports rising while China’s falls between 2017 and 2024, consistent with companies shifting sourcing out of China toward Mexico and other nearby locations. (dallasfed.org)
Given that (a) enough time has elapsed since mid‑2022, (b) the condition of unchanged 2022‑level delays failed, but (c) the substantive prediction—more brands shifting production/sourcing closer to home, especially to Mexico—clearly did occur, the fairest overall judgment is that the prediction was right in its core directional claim, albeit for a broader mix of reasons (tariffs, geopolitics, resilience) than just sustained shipping delays.