Many factors affect the production localisation process of global manufacturing companies. An area of great impact is the strategy for how to source material and components for a new production location. This paper presents a review of the main factors affecting the overall decision of localising production to a new site, and seeks to identify whether the sourcing and supply base development was considered during the decision process or not and in which way. The paper is based on interviews within four global manufacturing companies. The results of the theoretical and empirical studies indicate that the two most important factors affecting the production location at the studied companies were cost and proximity to markets/customers, verifying the expected reasons, while the impact of the sourcing factors was only considered to a less extent when making a location decision.