Global Value Chains and Supply Chain Trade: How Organizations Create Sustainable Business Models

To take a lead in the digital revolution, if not at least in order to follow it, organizations comprehensively review their business models. Falling transport costs and decreasing costs for information exchange have propelled the emergence of global value chains and with it supply chain trade. Whereas the former have enabled firms to move production of goods away from the places of consumption, the latter drive production being split up into individual tasks performed at different locations worldwide. Now, digitalization drives a third wave with considerable impact on the future commercial sustainability of business models in manufacturing, trade and, last but not least, logistics. This paper will use Baldwin's concept of the Two Unbundlings to explain globalization from a historical perspective and assess the implications of this development on the logistics industry, which benefited in past, but must now be on the lookout to meet the changing needs of their trading and manufacturing clients.