China Risk Calculator

China occupies a unique position in technology supply chains because it is simultaneously one of the largest manufacturing bases and one of the largest markets in the world. That dual role means exposure runs in both directions, and an assessment that looks only at supply — the instinctive framing — misses half the risk. A company might buy little from China yet earn a quarter of its revenue there, vulnerable to retaliation, regulation or the rise of a domestic competitor. Another might sell almost nothing into China yet depend on it for a critical input. Both are real; losing China as a customer can be as damaging as losing it as a supplier.

On top of the commercial picture, export controls have added a third axis that behaves differently from the others. Restrictions on advanced chips, manufacturing equipment, design tools and certain IP — and China's own controls on materials like gallium and germanium — mean some share of a portfolio may be legally unable to move regardless of commercial logic, and that share can change with little warning as policy evolves. Controlled-technology exposure is a policy risk, not a market risk, and it demands different mitigation: compliance, redesign, licensing, or exit from restricted segments.

What turns exposure into strategic risk is substitutability. Exposure you can replace — alternative suppliers, alternative markets, substitutable inputs — is manageable; exposure you can't is a trap, and the cost of decoupling scales directly with how irreplaceable your China dependence is. High exposure with low substitutability is the danger zone, where reducing reliance would be slow, expensive, or impossible. That's the real measure of China risk: not the raw exposure number, but how trapped it makes you.

And decoupling, when it's warranted, is neither fast nor cheap. Friend-shoring, domestic substitution and re-qualification take years and carry cost premiums, so the question is never simply whether to reduce exposure but how quickly, at what cost, and starting where. Use this calculator to see your exposure across all three dimensions, weigh it by substitutability to estimate the cost of exit, and sequence mitigation accordingly. Determine which products are actually controlled in the Export Control Checker, assess the related Taiwan concentration in the Taiwan Risk calculator, and roll it all into the Supply Risk Analyzer.