It seems like generations ago when “Globalization” with a capital “G”, was the watchword of corporate America, and of the largest companies and consumer brands in the world. Enabling technologies such as laptop computers, the internet, and the privatization of communications infrastructure in the 1980s made it feasible to move production and delivery of goods and services closer to their end user consumers. The expansion of free trade encouraged optimizing production cost by locating each stage of a product’s value chain wherever competitive advantage dictated.
