Wimbledon Slazenger Balls Bounce 50,000 Miles, Sort Of

Written by: Bob Larson Tennis on 28th June 2013

Wimbledon Slazenger Balls Bounce 50,000 Miles, Sort Of |

According to a piece in the London Guardian, the Slazenger tennis balls used at Wimbledon travel over 50,000 miles around the world before arriving from the Philippines factory in which they are now made.

Mark Johnson, an operations management expert at Warwick Business School who conducted the analysis, called it “It is one of the longest journeys I have seen for a product. On the face of it, traveling more than 50,000 miles to make a tennis ball does seem fairly ludicrous, but it just shows the global nature of production these days, and in the end, this will be the most cost-effective way of making tennis balls.”

Johnson’s research shows materials for the Slazenger balls fly between 11 countries and across four continents before being manufactured in the Philippines and then traveling the final 6,660 miles to Wimbledon.

The supply chain includes clay shipped from South Carolina, silica from Greece, magnesium carbonate from Japan, zinc oxide from Thailand, sulfur from South Korea and rubber from Malaysia to Bataan. The Guardian said that wool is shipped from New Zealand to Stroud in Gloucestershire, where it is weaved into felt and then flown back to the Philippines.

The newspapers does point out one downside to the savings that Slazenger gets from manufacturing in the third world the environmental cost of the extensive supply chains.