Supply Chain by the Numbers
   
 

- Feb. 18 , 2011 -

   
 

Supply Chain by the Numbers for Week of Feb. 18, 2011
   
  Oil Prices on Path to $300? Apple makes Supply Gambit; Killer App at Last for RFID? Toyota Stays Home, but will It Work?
   
 
 
 

$300

That's where long time and highly respected oil industry analyst Charles T. Maxwell says the price of oil per barrel is headed by 2020. The world simply won't have enough oil to meet demand, he told Barron's this week. Obviously a peak oil adherent, he believes global output will reach a production plateau around 2015 or 2016, and then start to decline.

 
 
 



 

60%

Share of the world's global touch panel supply Apple is said to have locked up for the next year, leaving rival companies struggling to secure the screens they need for their products. According to DigiTimes this week, Apple’s target of 40m iPad shipments in 2011 has led to massive orders, forcing tier-one rivals like Samsung, HP and Acer to look to smaller suppliers in order to fulfill their own demand. Difficulty making the screens is at the root of the problem.

 
 
 
750 million

That's how many RFID tags will be sold into the applications for apparel item-level tagging across the globe in 2011, according to new predictions from the analysts at ABI Research. That would mean that the number of tags that will be used for retail item-level tagging in apparel alone is likely to exceed the total number of tags consumed over the past five years for all RFID markets combined. The RFID industry may finally have found its "killer app."

 
 
 
 
18

Number of years since Toyota last opened a new assembly plant in its home market of Japan, as it chistened a new factory there this week to produce subcompact Yaris for the US and Middle East markets. Labor costs and a very high Yen will make it tough for Toyota to make any profits exporting these smaller cars, but the company was under some pressure to keep production on-shore.
 
 
 
 
 
 
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