Our global operations expose us to risks associated with public health crises, including epidemics and pandemics. Outbreaks of epidemics, pandemics, or public health crises could adversely affect, among other things, demand for our products and services; our operations and sales; our supply chain; our research and development capabilities, engineering, design, and manufacturing processes; and other important business activities. Such outbreaks could result in the restriction or suspension of travel, prohibitions of non-essential activities, and limit in-person activities within our Company and with customers and could also present operational challenges, such as disruptions in our manufacturing and supply chain and logistics, all of which can adversely affect our ability to fulfill orders, provide services, respond to customer requests and maintain our business operations. We are unable to predict the full extent of the impact of the outbreak of epidemics, pandemics, or public health crises on our operations, customers and suppliers.
Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants have resulted in, and may continue to result in, a slowdown of global economic activity, travel restrictions, prohibitions of non-essential activities in some cases, disruption and shutdown of businesses, including that of our customers and suppliers. Our operations have been affected by a range of external factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic that are not within our control, including the various governmental restrictions on employees, customers, partners and suppliers, such as China’s COVID Policy, designed to limit the spread of COVID-19. The pandemic and broader global market supply and demand dynamics have impacted, and continue to impact our supply chain with unpredictable disruptions due to material and component shortages, including with respect to key electronic components such as chips, capacity constraints, delays in shipment of materials necessary to the manufacture of our products, freight and logistics challenges, tight labor markets and inflation. While component supply shortages are showing signs of recovery, they may nevertheless persist, adversely disrupting our business. The ultimate extent of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including as a result of possible subsequent outbreaks of new variants and measures taken in response thereto remains highly uncertain and cannot currently be predicted and we may not be successful at mitigating such impacts.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant volatility and uncertainty in the global financial and capital markets. A further disruption of these markets, or resulting economic downturn from the COVID-19 pandemic or outbreak of other global health crises, may impact our ability to incur debt or access capital, or increase our cost of capital. There are no assurances that the credit markets or the capital markets will be available to us in the future or that the lenders participating in our credit facilities will be able to provide financing in accordance with their contractual obligations. Additionally, concerns over the economic impacts of COVID-19 have caused, and may continue to cause, volatility in our stock price. A sustained economic downturn could impact our liquidity position, including our ability to continue to pay dividends, or could impact our asset values resulting in the carrying value of our goodwill or other intangible assets exceeding their fair value, which may require us to recognize an impairment to those assets.