The past couple of years have been littered with incidents beyond the control of boardrooms, yet which have a significant impact on business. Events such as the Thai floods and Japanese earthquakes, along with the Arab Spring and other civil unrest, have persuaded many organisations to look for safer, more stable, harbour for critical nodes of their supply chains.

That the balance of commercial power is steadily shifting east is no secret, as western companies attracted by low labour rates and a willing workforce tap into the energy and growth of the, predominantly Chinese, market. But while companies have been importing from and outsourcing to China for some time, fewer have been tapping into the huge markets over there.

There’s been a flurry of press articles of late looking at the rising labour costs in Asia. This one in the Wall Street Journal from today, for example (registration may be required...), or this one in the latest edition of The Economist. But do we really care?

It seems like we've been talking about the retreat of globalisation for some time now. The rise of the middle classes in China, leading to wage inflation and the risk of increased disruption from strike action, combines with the huge variety of risk to be found in global supply chains. The combination is enough, it seems, to have persuaded many companies to pursue different strategies. And, for western economies at least, this is no bad thing.

A recent report from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Accenture on the increasing willingness of companies to fire suppliers who don’t meet emissions standards is welcome news - sort of. It’s gratifying that in an era when companies of all stripes brag in everything from annual reports to corporate ads about their sustainability and good-citizenship efforts that some are willing to take concrete action against those in their supply chain who ignore sustainability imperatives. As one procurement executive told me recently, sustainability efforts are nothing but “green wash” unless companies sever ties with suppliers who fail to meet standards, whether they relate to sustainability or other corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts, such as promotion of workers’ safety.

I've written about this before. Risked making myself look a little silly by arguing that the era of globalisation on which today's business world is based has seen its day. That we are in the midst of a retreat to more local times, when insourcing is the trend of note and goods are traded over hundreds of miles and not thousands of miles.

Perhaps it’s because Steve Jobs has just stepped aside leaving investors, customers and staff of the world’s second-largest company more than a little twitchy. Perhaps it’s because there genuinely is a problem of significant proportions in the environmental and safety performance of Apple’s Chinese suppliers.

An interesting story appeared on the website of Taiwanese electronics magazine Digitimes in which it reported that suppliers to mobile handset manufacturer HTC are helping the company to bypass crucial Apple patents.

Procter & Gamble is a company that is about as international as you are going to get. As a result of its brands being sold in approximately 180 countries around the world, geopolitical risk is something its leaders must spend a great deal of time trying to understand.