One molecule, two ledgers

The molecule that stood still

Hormuz hit the raw material. Suez hit the route. Same product, two geographies.

The war in the Middle East began on 28 February 2026. Before it, nearly 1.2 million barrels of naphtha a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz, meeting 60 to 70 per cent of Asia’s import needs and accounting for 80 to 90 per cent of the Middle East’s naphtha exports, according to S&P Global. Naphtha makes ethylene, and ethylene makes most of what procurement calls plastic. Asian ethylene prices more than doubled in a month.

S&P’s analysis, reported by C&EN, puts roughly 29 million tonnes of ethylene capacity, out of a global 232 million, directly in the conflict zone. Dow’s Sadara joint venture with Saudi Aramco suspended operations. Force majeure ran down the value chain, and in Europe the French plastics industry body ELIPSO challenged the validity of force majeure declarations from INEOS, LyondellBasell, SABIC and Indorama. ICIS data, cited by Packaging Europe, showed prices for petrochemical building blocks rising faster than at any point since 2007.

Healthcare is the sector where the chain is easiest to follow. Fortune reported that shortages of polypropylene and PVC limited the availability of syringes, IV bags and sterile packaging, with the effect passing to European and American buyers as higher procurement costs and longer lead-time risk. Crude to naphtha to ethylene to polymer to foam, tubing or film to a product in a hospital. Every step has a Scope 3 entry. In 2026 every step also had a delivery date that moved.

Suez, the same lesson from the transport side

Suez is the same lesson from the transport side. The Ever Given in 2021 and the Red Sea diversions of 2023 and 2024 did not touch the molecule; they touched the route it travels. A product built on fossil feedstock carries two geographic exposures, where the material is made and where it is shipped, and both have failed within five years.

Sources: S&P Global (APIC 2026 report); S&P via C&EN, April 2026; ICIS via Packaging Europe, April 2026.

What Swedish companies abroad said, before and after 28 February

Business Sweden’s Global Business Climate Survey 2026 is the closest thing the Nordics have to a controlled experiment. More than 2,250 Swedish-owned companies operating in 41 markets answered, roughly three-quarters before the war began and a quarter after. The report’s own comparison: responses submitted after the outbreak were less positive, positive assessments of the business climate declined in every region except Europe, and the deterioration was clearest among large and medium-sized companies. Turnover expectations weakened most in Asia-Pacific and MEA+. Lena Sellgren, Business Sweden’s Chief Economist, opens CPO Outlook 2026 with this material and the trade-flow work behind it.

The same survey found customers in those 41 export markets, weighted towards Europe, rating environmental factors slightly lower in purchasing decisions than a year earlier: 34 per cent in 2026 against 38 per cent in 2025. Sustainability as a purchasing argument weakened in the same year it hardened as a supply constraint.

Substitution is risk work

Where a material is fossil, the climate case and the continuity case are one case.

EcoVadis’s Sustainable Procurement Barometer 2026, produced with Accenture from 1,000 multinational buyers and nearly 2,000 suppliers, records the shift in what programmes are for. Managing sustainability risk and compliance is the leading programme driver today, cited by 56 per cent; only 32 per cent expect it to remain a top-three driver in two to three years. Net-zero delivery is expected to take over at 48 per cent, with supply chain innovation and transformation at 37 per cent. Circularity and resource efficiency is the leading innovation priority, cited by 43 per cent, and the report describes leaders as organisations that rethink materials and redesign products rather than monitor suppliers.

EBG’s reading is that “rethink materials” is a risk sentence as much as a sustainability sentence. A category manager who moves a foam, a film or a resin off naphtha-derived feedstock has reduced a Scope 3 line and removed a Hormuz dependency in the same purchase order. No business case is needed to link the two. They are the same line.

The question that lands on procurement

A dozen years, ten events, one question: do we have any exposure to this?

The pattern of the last decade is not only that disruptions come more often. It is that the question arrives faster, and it arrives at procurement, regardless of where the relationship formally sits. A bank’s software vendor is contracted by IT. An insurer’s reinsurance data provider is contracted by the business. When the question is “do we have any exposure”, it is answered from the supplier register, and the register lives in procurement.

Twelve years of the same question

• 2013Rana Plaza. Brands had days to establish whether their production was in that building. Many could not, because the contract was with an agent.
• 2010–2017Conflict minerals. The US Dodd-Frank Act, section 1502 (2010), and, applying from 2021, EU Regulation 2017/821 turned a human rights question into a smelter list in the procurement system .
• Dec 2021Log4Shell. Every company had to know, within days, which systems and which suppliers carried the vulnerability.
• Feb 2022Russia. EU sanctions, and parallel US and UK regimes, with ownership tests meant the question was not “do we trade with Russia” but “who owns our suppliers’ suppliers”. It reached banks and insurers whose exposure was entirely indirect.
• Jun 2022UFLPA. The US law on Uyghur forced labour reversed the burden of proof: goods with Xinjiang inputs are presumed made with forced labour unless the importer proves otherwise. Shipments were held at the border.
• Oct 2022US semiconductor export controls. Entity lists changing at weeks’ notice; the question “is anyone on the list in our chain” landed on procurement.
• 2023The EU PFAS restriction proposal. “Do we buy anything containing PFAS?” Few could say, because it is not on the part number.
• Jul 2024CrowdStrike. Not an attack, an update. The question that morning: which of our suppliers are down?
• Jan 2025DORA. The EU regulation requires financial entities to keep a register of all ICT third-party arrangements, subcontractors included. The contract sits in the business; the register sits in procurement.
• Apr 2025Rare earths. China’s export restrictions cut magnet shipments by roughly 75 per cent in May and paused car production in Europe. The ECB later found that over 80 per cent of large European firms are no more than three intermediaries from a Chinese rare earth producer. No Tier 1 supplier had failed.
• Mar 2026Hormuz. See above.

Ten questions in twelve years. On the evidence below, most organisations started each one from scratch.

Procurement 1.0: knowing your suppliers as an asset that compounds

EBG’s founder, Anna Bjärkerud, has argued for years that the function needs to return to a first principle: know your suppliers, and let every question asked of the supply base leave a layer of insight the next question can build on, instead of reinventing the wheel with each new rule or disruption. She calls it Procurement 1.0. It sounds obvious. The data says it is not what happens.

The map exists, the relationship does not

McKinsey’s 2025 supply chain risk survey, a hundred supply chain organisations, found 95 per cent with visibility into Tier 1 risks and 42 per cent with visibility into Tier 2 or beyond. The sentence that matters more: 58 per cent had mapped their Tier 2 suppliers, but fewer than half of those had regular direct contact with them. The map exists. The relationship does not. Respondents cited resource limits in their own function and Tier 1 suppliers reluctant to make introductions. Tier 2 visibility rose 22 percentage points in 2025, and McKinsey attributes the jump to tariffs: companies needed to show where components came from for compliance reasons. Knowledge was built because something external demanded it, after several years in which the same measure had declined.

EcoVadis records the same habit from the sustainability side. Self-assessment questionnaires are deployed across all suppliers at 4.7 times the average rate of other engagement actions. Leaders, the report says, monitor suppliers continuously through dashboards and alerts “rather than periodic data collection exercises”, and standardise how sub-tier data is captured so it can be compared over time. Only 12 per cent of respondents have visibility into more than half of their Tier 2 suppliers.

Why the habit is expensive

The frequency makes the habit expensive. McKinsey Global Institute’s 2020 estimate is that supply chain disruptions lasting a month or longer occur every 3.7 years on average, costing companies almost 45 per cent of one year’s profits over a decade. Peter Kraljic’s 1983 argument that purchasing must become supply management was, in substance, the same point: a function that knows its supply markets, not only its contracts. Scale ate that. The volume Volvo Group Trucks Purchasing works with, more than 18,000 suppliers and over a million sub-suppliers, is where the argument has to hold now.

EBG’s own 2025 Nordic data points the same way: 75% of Xperience participants named visibility beyond Tier 1 as their biggest risk challenge, 71% described their sub-tier visibility as limited, none claimed a fully mapped multi-tier network, and 68% still rated their risk management proactive and structured. Gothenburg sub-sample, 28 of 86 participants.

Where CPO Outlook 2026 takes it

The sessions that carry this thread on 14 October.

None of these sessions will settle the question. They are built for a room to work on it, in the EBG format: a host sets the tone, and then the people who carry the question in their own organisations compare how they have answered it.

The question for the reader

Take the last three times someone asked your function “do we have any exposure to this”. How much of the answer already existed from the time before, and how much was rebuilt from nothing?

CPO Outlook 2026 is EBG | Network’s 23rd summit, 14–15 October at Hotel Birger Jarl in Stockholm. Two days of peer labs and roundtables, each running twice with fresh groups, keynotes from operating leaders, and the Nordic CPO of the Year award. Programme · Programme brief (PDF) · Brief film · Register