When one customer dominates
Supply chain concentration and supply chain relationships are among the fastest-growing keywords across the tracked journals. Finance papers treat a dominant customer as risk; management papers treat it as dependence, through resource dependence theory. The two rarely meet. Does depending on one big customer make suppliers more innovative or more fragile?
What prompted this#
Across all journals, "supply chain concentration" had 18 papers in July–September 2026 against about 7 expected and "supply chain relationships" 17 against 5; in management, "resource dependence theory" grew too (10 against 5); see the trends page. Since October 2025, 75 papers carry a customer-concentration or supply-chain-concentration keyword (43 in finance journals, 15 in economics, 10 in management), and only 3 of them carry the resource-dependence keyword.
Questions#
- Do suppliers with a dominant customer invest more in relationship-specific innovation, and does the customer share the gains?
- What happens to them when the customer leaves, is acquired or moves production abroad?
- Which responses reduce the risk: long-term contracts, cross-shareholdings or diversification?
Data that could help#
Customer disclosures in filings (Compustat segment data; the top-five customer disclosures of Chinese listed firms in CSMAR), patents and supply-chain links.
Next step#
Use the top-five customer disclosures of Chinese listed firms to find suppliers that lost a major customer, and compare their patenting and sales before and after.