Reshoring is less than 1% of Euro-Area restructuring, ING finds
Since 2019, bringing production home has accounted for under 1% of recorded euro-area corporate restructuring events, against roughly 4% for offshoring.
The number that guts the speech
Start with the ledger, not the podium. ING Economics went through recorded euro-area restructuring events since 2019 and found that reshoring — production physically moved back home — accounted for less than 1% of them. Offshoring, the thing every trade minister has sworn to reverse, ran at about 4%.
That's a four-to-one ratio pointing the wrong way. Seven years after "strategic autonomy" became Brussels shorthand for self-sufficiency, the actual movement of factories is still leaving Europe faster than it's coming back. The policy exists. The speeches exist. The reallocated capital, by and large, does not.
This matters because reshoring and friend-shoring are the two loudest structural promises in Western economic policy right now. Both are premised on a break in the plates: the assumption that companies, shocked by 2020, by Suez, by the Ukraine war, have permanently changed how they source. The data says they've changed how they talk about sourcing.
What the C-suites actually said
Here's where it gets awkward. Polling keeps finding near-universal intent. The Agility Emerging Markets Index, released this week, reports that more than 97% of executives say their companies have made or will make significant shifts in production and sourcing through homeshoring, nearshoring, friend-shoring or regionalization.
Ninety-seven percent. And yet ING's count of what actually happened in Europe sits below 1% for reshoring.
Both numbers can be true at once, and that's the story. A company can "shift sourcing" by adding a second supplier in Vietnam while its primary supplier in Guangdong keeps running three shifts. It can "regionalize" by opening a distribution centre in Poland while the plant stays in Shenzhen. Survey answers measure intentions and pilot programmes. Restructuring records measure where the machines ended up. The gap between them is where the entire policy edifice is quietly wobbling.
The charade problem
This isn't a European quirk. The Asia Times went through trade data in 2023 and found that US imports from the supposed friend-shoring venues — Mexico, Vietnam, India — lean heavily on Chinese components, assembled in those third countries and shipped onward to American ports. Albert Pinto flagged the study on X with a blunt summary: friend-shoring as "a pantomime for political consumption."
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The trade statistics themselves are complicit. When a Chinese-made circuit board crosses into Vietnam, gets soldered into a module, and leaves as a Vietnamese export, the value-added shows up on Vietnam's ledger. The origin story gets laundered by a border crossing. Washington sees a supply chain diversifying away from China. The chain, in many cases, just got a new passport.
That's rerouting, not decoupling. And it explains why the reshoring headline numbers can look encouraging while the underlying dependency barely moves.
The inflation bill nobody voted for
Simon Mikhailovich made the point back in 2022, before most of this policy was written into law: globalization was highly deflationary, and replacing offshoring with geopolitically aligned trading zones would be highly inflationary. He called it "RIP globalization."
He was directionally right, and the mechanism is simple. Offshoring chased the cheapest competent supplier on earth. Friend-shoring deliberately excludes that supplier and pays a premium for political comfort. Every layer of that premium — higher labour costs, duplicated tooling, smaller production runs split across two or three plants, compliance paperwork for rules-of-origin — lands somewhere. Usually on the consumer, eventually on the ballot.
Europe already knows this. The continent spent 2022 and 2023 paying crisis prices for energy it used to buy cheaply from Russia, and the industrial base noticed. Chemical plants and aluminium smelters in Germany cut output or closed. That was an energy shock, not a friend-shoring shock, but it showed how fast a continent's manufacturing base responds when input costs break upward. Friend-shoring is the same trade — security purchased at a markup — spread across a thousand products instead of one fuel line.
Where the plates might actually move
The honest read isn't that reshoring is fake everywhere. It's that it's concentrated, slow, and driven by things politicians don't control: chips, defence, pharmaceuticals, anything where a single foreign supplier is an existential bet. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's Arizona build is the clearest case — billions spent, years of delay, and it's happening because the alternative is a national security exposure, not because Arizona beats Taiwan on cost.
For the rest of the economy — furniture, apparel, consumer electronics, auto parts — the calculus hasn't flipped. China is still the world's manufacturing floor, and the floor doesn't move because a minister gave a speech.
Chieko Nagayama, posting from Japan this spring, framed the shift as a security correction: decades of prioritizing cheapness, China winning that game completely, and governments now waking up to the risk of a single country controlling the economy's chokepoints. Japan has moved faster than most, subsidizing relocation out of China. That's a real policy with real money behind it. But even Japan's programme is measured in billions against a trade relationship measured in hundreds of billions.
So watch the restructuring records, not the press releases. Watch the rules-of-origin enforcement, not the summit communiqués. The plates underneath global trade are genuinely shifting — toward regional blocs, toward duplication, toward higher costs. But the shift is being run by boardrooms protecting margins, not by governments promising sovereignty. Until the cost gap closes, or until a real shock forces the issue, reshoring will stay where ING found it: under 1%, and mostly on slides.
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