Supply Chain

8 companies are the only source of something

The single-source dependency field. Each mark in the strands is one relationship the substrate records as sole-source: a named supplier, a named customer, a named input, and no second supplier on file. Columns are the supplier’s home jurisdiction — the side that carries the leverage, since whoever can withhold sits under one government’s authority — and within a column marks group by the supplier itself, most critical highest. Mark form encodes the assessed criticality score, which on this set occupies only 8 to 10 of the substrate’s 1–10 scale, so the three forms are the three values present rather than thirds of the range; a struck amber mark is a relationship the substrate records as ended. The band beneath draws the same 54 at one cell each, inked at the head of every other relationship in the substrate, so the reader sees them against 14,950 rather than floating free. The honest limit is the one that matters most: an absent second source in this substrate is not evidence that no second source exists in the world — it is evidence that Scrutica has not recorded one.

The substrate holds 14,950 bilateral supplier–customer relationships between 5,085 named companies across 72 countries — licensed supply-chain pulls, SEC EDGAR and public-registry re-derivations, and CSET entity classification. Of those, 54 record no alternative supplier at all. They trace back to 8 companies in 5 jurisdictions, and 26 companies sit on the receiving end of one. 4 of the 54 are already severed — the substrate records an end date, and in each case an export-control action or an entity designation is what ended it. How the graph is assembled↗