Clay Williams
Analyst · Cowen. Cowan. Your line is now open.
Mark, it's a great question. It's extraordinarily difficult to answer. Other than to say, we go through intensive detailed reviews with 18 business units, every quarter, and I would tell you, it came up in every single business unit. And we spent a lot of time talking about it, because it's kind of everywhere. The shutdown of the global economy in 2020, it's hard to overstate how disrupted that's been to a tightly wound global supply chain. And we're seeing it kind of all over the place. That's not to say we're not managing through it, I think our folks are doing a great job covering inflation with price increases and surcharges, like we talked about earlier. They're doing a great job finding alternative ways to meet the needs of our customers find alternative suppliers. Our scale is really helping out here a lot. But, it's sort of a really, really extraordinarily challenging time coming off of an extraordinarily challenging event. But what I would say is the allocations in certain raw materials, the difficulty of getting certain sub-components, and the difficulty of getting integrated circuit boards are more challenging than just the straight costs that we're seeing. The cost like I said, we're more or less able to cover that through pricing and surcharges. But it's the disruption because, we need all of the parts to the modules that we put together the products that we deliver, before we can deliver that. So we're short one component, well that disrupts our production schedule and is a problem. So I would add to that, this global supply chain that was so tightly well pre-pandemic, was really facilitated by a robust ecosystem of industrial suppliers and distributors. And in 2020, they all found their business under a lot of pressure. And so many of them depleted their inventories as well. And so in sort of normal times, you have industrial distributors of steel of all these components of sub-assemblies in the like, who would absorb shocks from either the production side of things, to the extent shocks would arise from time to time or on the demand side of things. Tut they performed a very important sort of shock absorber function. And when they depleted their inventories in 2020, and inventories are still very, very lean. They took out sort of one of the shock absorbers that that that NOV and other industrial manufacturers relied upon. And so that's another sort of factor that's exacerbating the challenge here. But very, very proud on NOV's ability to manage through this to creatively work through new solutions and to access what we need where we need it, and to try to stay ahead of the challenges. And like I said, I think we're getting better at it. Q2 was a little better than Q1. And so we're working our way through it.