Thomas Knudsen, executive chairman of Toll Group, the Japan Post-owned logistics company that has operated freight forwarding and contract logistics across Asia since 1888, has a blunt message for companies still treating supply chain disruption as a series of one-off crises: stop. What businesses are actually facing, he argues, is a flock of black swan events, not isolated shocks to absorb and move past.
Knudsen’s case rests on the sheer density of major disruptions since 2020. The COVID pandemic, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a wave of US tariffs introduced in 2025, and the US-Iran conflict’s disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have landed close enough together that companies have had little real recovery time between them, a pattern that Knudsen argues has exposed vulnerabilities running far deeper into supply chains than most companies had mapped.
Specifically, he points to tier two, three and four suppliers, the companies several layers removed from a business’s direct vendors, as where the real exposure now sits. Most corporate risk planning has historically focused on direct, tier-one relationships, leaving the deeper layers of the supply chain largely unmonitored and, as a result, the most likely place for a disruption to surface without warning.
That's why Knudsen draws a sharp distinction between resilient and robust supply chains, and argues the first is no longer sufficient. A resilient supply chain bounces back after a shock; a robust one is built with enough structural redundancy that a shock doesn't force a full recovery process in the first place, a meaningfully higher bar that requires permanent infrastructure investment rather than contingency planning alone.
His concrete recommendation centers on diversifying transportation modes deliberately, building backup capacity across trucking, rail, ocean and air routes so that a disruption to any single mode doesn't halt the entire flow of goods. He's candid about the limits of that approach too, acknowledging it doesn't pencil out economically for low-value goods like cement, where the cost of maintaining multiple redundant shipping options can exceed the value of the product itself.
Knudsen also sees the tariff environment as producing a lasting structural shift rather than a temporary rerouting. He argues 2025's tariffs are permanently redirecting manufacturing away from China toward new regional hubs, a change he frames not as a disruption to eventually reverse but as the new baseline companies need to plan their supply chains around going forward.
The throughline across his comments is a rejection of reactive crisis management as an adequate strategy. For a logistics veteran who has watched four major global disruptions compound on each other in under six years, Knudsen's argument is that the companies still planning for the next shock as if it were the last one are already behind.
