According to a survey undertaken by international business consultants Baker & McKenzie, various risks pertaining to suppliers have been identified. Overall, several supply chain management strategies have also been proposed. When a company uses third parties for supply, manufacture, transportation, distribution or sale of their products it faces a certain number of risks. It is in order to identify these risks and to prevent them that 100 executive directors of multinational firms were interrogated during this survey.

The emerging markets which present the greatest level of risk are China (40%), India (30%), Africa (26%), Russia (22%) and Latin America (21%). Corruption (69%), political instability (33%) and default in application of regulations (18%) represent the three main risks in these markets.

All of the respondents stated that they paid greater attention to the risk of reputation than financial considerations in the choice of their partner suppliers. Concerning the management of supply chains, these are worried about corruption, quality of products and risks of non compliance.