Not an auto manufacturer, not a company which supplies auto manufacturers or makes third-party auto parts or is in that industry at all. But, it uses a byproduct of the auto suppliers created as waste to them but used heavily by manufacturers in other industries.
That byproduct is not used in actual production of my wife's company's products (or by other manufacturers) but used at the tail end of R&D/very beginning of new product roll out to test new manufacturing processes (let just say my wife's company has a LOT of manufacturing all over the U.S. and world and still has significant R&D and as a result quite a bit of new product lines being tested at all times). This waste byproduct - some sort of fluid created in the manufacture of tires, the bulk of which is done for new cars in this country - is in huge demand by many manufacturers in several other fields and was suddenly next-to-impossible to get when the auto manufacturers started stopping their lines, creating a dramatic slow down for the tire manufacturers.
So, you had this huge and seemingly unrelated manufacturer of, oh, about 50,0000 products, also looking (at best) at dramatically slowing down some of the new product manufacturing testing (these are new products, but vetted by R&D and at this point it is just a matter of perfecting the process which will then be duplicated on a much larger scale at various plants in the U.S. and outside the U.S). Which also delays what my wife's company orders from other manufacturers to equip these plants for the new product lines.
All this because they - like many others - use somebody else's waste product (that being, the waste fluid from tire manufacturing - for reasons beyond my science-deficient brain, this stuff is prefect for whatever that use is and to make just for the waste fluid is cost-prohibitive).
That is when I realized just what a integrated spider web American manufacturing is.
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