When the chain breaks:Corporate Resilience After Major Supply Chain Disruptions

In recent years, businesses have increasingly faced unparalleled exposure to extreme supply chain disruptions, highlighting the urgent need for empirical insight into what enables firms to recover effectively. While resilience has been widely acknowledged as essential, existing research often remains theoretical or limited to isolated case studies. This thesis examines which firm-level characteristics most strongly support organizational resilience, defined as a firm’s ability to recover revenue following a major disruption.The study focuses on two extreme events in the context of supply chain disruptions: the 2011 Japan tsunami and the 2021 Suez Canal blockage. The study uses structured panel data from Orbis and adopts a quantitative approach, analyzing financial and operational data of 100 firms across affected sectors. Three strategic aspects are analyzed using linear regression models: financial flexibility (measured by cash reserves), supply chain complexity (through inventory levels), and innovation behavior (based on R&D expenditure). Additional group comparisons and robustness checks are utilized to strengthen the validity of the results.Findings indicate that financial flexibility is the most consistent and statistically significant enabler of post-disruption resilience, providing companies with both shock absorption and strategic responses. Supply chain complexity showed positive effects in post-disruption recovery, though only as a reactive buffer. Conversely, innovation behavior did not exhibit a clear or significant impact within the two-year recovery window.Overall, the results contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how firms recover from severe supply chain disruptions and offer useful implications for organizational resilience building by managers through concrete evidence-based practices.