China has been the factory of the world for the last 4 decades. The pandemic triggered a reckoning of this status.

Global manufacturing powerhouse China’s rise as the world’s factory spanned over four decades and ushered in an era of globalization and integrated supply chains.

But that facade started to crumble around 2018, after former President Donald Trump launched a trade war against the East Asian giant. This, in turn, has prompted investors to reassess their geopolitical risks.

While some investors did move parts of their manufacturing facilities out of China at the time, it was really the pandemic — and China’s zero-COVID policy — that drove home the importance of not depending on one country for manufacturing needs. 

“The geopolitical tensions in themselves may not have resulted into this level of realignment of supply chains, but COVID certainly provided that extra vision extra fillip, the extra fuel to the fire,” Ashutosh Sharma, a research director at market research firm Forrester, told Insider earlier in December.

And the effects of the trade war continue to linger. President Joe Biden hasn’t kiboshed the elevated tariffs Trump imposed on China — in fact, in October, he imposed export controls on shipping equipment to Chinese-owned factories making advanced logic chips. This further burdened an already strained relationship. 

To navigate this complicated web of US-China trade tensions, multinationals are now more than ever, looking to hedge their business risks.

Here are five countries where China’s supply chains are moving to instead. 

India is trying to unseat China in higher-end manufacturing, with iPhone maker Apple and chipmakers eyeing its vast lands and young population.

With it’s vast lands and large, young population, India is a natural alternative to China as the world’s factory.

Particularly, since India’s population is set to surpass China’s to become the world’s most populous country in 2023, the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs said in a July report.

Tech giant Apple, for one, has already moved some of its iPhone production to the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, and is exploring moving its iPad manufacturing to the South Asian nation as well. JP Morgan analysts expect Apple to move 5% of its iPhone 14 to India by the end of 2022, they wrote in a September note. They foresee that one in four iPhones will be made in India by 2025.

India has a large labor pool, a long history of manufacturing, and government support for boosting industry and exports. Because of this, many are exploring whether Indian manufacturing is a viable alternative to China,” Julie Gerdeman, the CEO of supply chain risk management platform Everstream, told Insider.

However, the move is easier said than done.

India’s Prime Minister Modi has been working on attracting foreign direct investments, or FDI, since he took office in 2014, sending FDI to a record $83.6 billion in the last fiscal year, according to government data. 

But significant hurdles still exist — even though the Indian government is boosting its appeal to foreign investments, it’s still harder to do business in the country than in China, in part due to bureaucracy, red tape, and multiple stakeholders that prolong decision-making.

Vietnam has been undergoing rapid economic reforms since 1986, which have yielded significant returns.

As a Communist country, Vietnam — like China — has also been undergoing rapid economic reforms since 1986.

The reforms have yielded results, propelling Vietnam from “one of the world’s poorest nations to a middle-income economy in one generation,” the World Bank said in a November 2022 post.

In 2021, Vietnam attracted over $31.15 billion in foreign direct investment pledges — more than 9% higher from a year ago, according to the country’s Ministry of Planning and Investment. About 60% of the investments went to the manufacturing and processing sector.

Vietnam’s key strengths are in the manufacturing of apparel, footwear, and electronics and electrical appliances.

Aside from India, tech giant Apple has already moved some iPhone manufacturing to Vietnam and is also planning to move some of its MacBook production to the Southeast Asian nation.

Other companies that have shifted some of their production lines out of China to Vietnam include Nike, Adidas, and Samsung.

Thailand’s FDI rose threefold between 2020 and 2021 as manufacturers move away from China.

As Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy, Thailand has been moving up the value chain in manufacturing and is a production hub for car parts, vehicles and electronics, with multinationals such as Sony and Sharp setting up shop here.  

Sony said in 2019 it was closing its Beijing smartphone plant in 2019 to cut costs and relocated some of the production to Thailand. Sharp said in the same year it was moving some of its printer production to Thailand due to the US-China trade war.

It’s not just international firms. Even China-based firms have relocated parts of their supply chain to Thailand. Companies producing solar panels such as Shanghai-based JinkoSolar are moving their production to Southeast Asian nation to take advantage of lower costs, and avoid gepolitical tensions, the South China Morning Post reported in July 2022.

“Setting up manufacturing plants abroad didn’t come from [the pursuit of] opportunities, it is more of a strategy to deal with challenges to gain market access,” Zhuang Yan, the president of Canadian Solar, said at an industry event in July, the SCMP reported. 

Foreign direct investments rose threefold to 455.3 billion Thai baht, or $13.1 million, between 2020 to 2021, Thailand’s Board of Investment announced in February this year. 

Bangladesh is already a beneficiary of the supply chain shift away from China. It now wants a bigger slice of the pie.

Even before the COVID-19 lockdowns crippled China’s manufacturing sector, Bangladesh has been a rising star in the garment manufacturing sector.

Bangladesh’s rise was primary due to rising labor costs in China pre-dating Trump’s presidency.

The cost difference is large — the average monthly salary of a worker in Bangladesh is $120 or less than one-fifth the $670 a factory worker takes home in the South China manufacturing hub of Guangzhou, Mostafiz Uddin, the owner of Bangladeshi apparel manufacturer Denim Expert, told Insider.

“Moreover, rising material costs is pushing apparel companies to look for alternative destinations like Bangladesh where production prices are comparatively low,” Uddin said.

Despite a high profile building collapse that killed at least 1,132 people in April 2013 and dented Bangladesh work safety reputation, its garment manufacturing industry is a key pillar of Bangladesh’s economy, accounting for nearly 85% of shipments or over $42 billion of the country’s exports in 2021. The country is also the world’s second-largest garments exporter, after China.

Bangladesh is now working to attracting investments beyond the garment sector, and is working to attract more investments into other sectors including pharmaceuticals and agriculture processing.