Dan Florness
Analyst · Cleveland Research. Your line is open
I’d say – I’d say yes to each and every one of those to a certain degree and no to another, and that is we started some months ago in earnest looking at where we’re sourcing, and – but you also have to look at it from the standpoint of what’s the alternative source, is there capacity available, is the quality the same and what’s the price point. We could boost some stuff out of China to another source, if you add 5%, 6%, 7% and that 10% is there for the next three years, that’s a good decision. If you add – if you do that and you add 15% or 20% or 30% to the cost, it’s a really bad idea. It becomes a less bad idea if 10% goes to 25% and it sticks. So, in an environment where there’s political variability as opposed to economic variability, makes it very challenging to plan. And the biggest thing is having a good open dialog with your customer, but also understanding for a lot of our customers what we spend is a relatively small part of their spend or what we sell is a relatively small part of their spend, so, it’s creating the least amount of disruption to their supply chain, but we have redirected some already. As far as buying ahead, the problem with that is the – predicting exactly what’s going to be needed and where and for some items you can do it. But again, depending on what’s going to happen because supply chains – when we order stuff today it’s not coming in next week or next month, it’s coming in three, four months from now. So, you have some limited ability to do that, but to the extent we can redirect some, absolutely we’ve been doing that. But Adam, just to sort of flesh out the question, the inventory I would not expect it to move meaningfully based on pre-bought volumes. Again, we’ve looked into it, there is tight capacity for products in a lot of places and we didn’t have the ability to meaningfully ramp up the amount that we pre-purchased based on what is pre-existing tight capacity.