I asked a client to tell me what tooling they owned at their contract manufacturer in China. They didn't know.
Not approximately — they genuinely didn't have a record of it. The tooling had been transferred years earlier, invoices were somewhere in old emails, and nobody had confirmed what was still there, what condition it was in, or whether some of it had quietly been repurposed.
This wasn't a small issue. The manufacturer made their entire core product. There was no backup source. If the relationship had ended — for any reason — re-sourcing would have taken one to two years and required re-qualifying the tooling from scratch. Assuming they could get it back.
One of my first recommendations was to build a tooling register: a complete list of every piece of tooling at the CM, who owned it, its current condition, and its estimated replacement value. Not glamorous work. But you cannot manage an asset you haven't inventoried.
The broader point: when your entire product depends on a single manufacturer, you need to know exactly what you have there, what it would cost to replace, and under what conditions you could move it. Most companies with contract manufacturers in Asia don't have clear answers to any of those questions.
If something changes — ownership, capacity, a trade dispute, a factory fire — the companies that recover fastest are the ones who already knew the answer.