Few other industries concentrate such a massive, fragmented supplier base in a few big buyers.
Well, the federal bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler saved those two companies as well as the supplier base.
But it would be enough to preserve the skills and supplier base required to ramp up production fast in an emergency.
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The impact on Boeing is somewhat more complex than for the predominantly non-military supplier base due to heavy disproportionate defense program cuts.
This company has a supplier base in all 50 states, many of which are small businesses that rely solely on Newport News Shipbuilding for their business.
The alliance would also allow Fiat Group and Chrysler to take advantage of each other's distribution networks and to optimize fully their respective manufacturing footprint and global supplier base.
And in 2005 EADS Sodern, a French maker of satellites' control and positioning systems and subsidiary of the Franco-German company EADS, said it would start to phase out its American supplier base.
Many large companies "have come to understand what can happen to their supplier base when there is disruption" and are looking at how they can help mitigate the impact on suppliers, said Michael McDonough, global head of supply chain at J.
If development programs are curtailed their absence will not be noticed on the battlefield because the weapons they would have yielded are not yet there, and the programs usually have a small domestic political footprint due to the absence of a production line and articulated supplier base.
For example you might have Texas Instrument or TI which is the biggest supplier in the base-band market or DSP (Digital Signal Processing) but still have competition from the likes of Lucent, Motorola, Qualcomm.
Moscow is Syria's largest arms supplier and maintains a naval base in Tartus.
Android and iOS account for a combined 85% of the market but the near-duopoly could break in the coming years, with Microsoft making a reinvigorated assault on the mobile space with its Windows Phone 8 OS. But with Microsoft going with Qualcomm as the sole supplier of chipsets for WP8 handsets, Qualcomm has that base covered as well.
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