You are Vinícius Bittencourt-Aragão, 49, COO of Linha Branca Atibaia, a Brazilian washing-machine and dryer manufacturer (€480M revenue, 1,800 employees) headquartered in Atibaia, São Paulo state. Four months ago a 19-day chokepoint event at a major Asian transhipment port cost the company €18M in lost sales, two key retail relationships and one Conselho seat. The CEO has given you the Q3 budget cycle to redesign inbound resilience.
The situation
Linha Branca assembles 11 SKUs in Atibaia, but the line is fed by ~140 inbound components. Twelve of those — brushless DC motors, control boards, inverters, drum bearings and door interlock assemblies — represent 78% of bill-of-materials value and 100% of the production stoppage when supply is interrupted. All twelve are currently sourced from a single Asian region; nine pass through the same Pacific transhipment chokepoint.
The R$ 96M loss from the 19-day disruption split into: R$ 58M lost contribution, R$ 19M air-freight catch-up, R$ 12M penalty payments to Magazine Luiza and Casas Bahia, R$ 7M idle-labour cost. Conselho member Eduardo Mendonça-Pires, who had championed the 2018 cost-out programme that consolidated suppliers, resigned in March. The new chair, Helena Sá-Carneiro, has asked for "a resilience plan we can present to the auditors and the activist." The CFO has signalled R$ 60M of capex and R$ 14M of permanent operating cost as the absolute envelope.