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Trade Wars
Nippon Steel to Shortlist Two or Three States for New US Plant
Japan's Nippon Steel Corp. hopes to narrow down a list of candidate sites by next summer and make a final decision by the end of 2026 on a location for its United States Steel Corp. subsidiary to build a plant in the U.S. market, Takahiro Mori, vice chairman of the Japanese maker, said in a recent interview. Nippon Steel, which acquired U.S Steel in June, plans to set up two electric furnaces that mainly use scrap iron as raw material, investing 4 billion dollars. The two electric furnaces at the new plant are expected to have a combined annual capacity of some 3 million tons of crude steel.
Referring to criteria for picking the plant site, Mori cited factors such as land, electricity, and railroad and road networks as well as human resources and policies to be taken to host the plant. "Various states have shown their interest" after Nippon Steel explained its demands to them, he said. To narrow down the candidate site list, Nippon Steel also plans to consider such conditions as steel demand in neighboring areas and the ease of procuring materials.
Read more at Bloomberg
XLight, Commerce Department Ink $150M CHIPS Act Incentives for Electron Laser To be Built at Albany NanoTech
Silicon Valley startup XLight announced on Monday that it has signed a letter of intent with the U.S. Department of Commerce for $150 million in proposed federal incentives under the CHIPS and Science Act. The incentives would go toward construction, expansion and demonstration of a free-electron laser, or FEL, prototype as an alternative light source for extreme ultraviolet lithography, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s press release. Additionally, the Commerce Department would receive $150 million of equity in XLight, making the agency one of the semiconductor startup’s stakeholders.
XLight will build its first FEL system at the NY Creates’ Albany NanoTech Complex, CEO and CTO Nicholas Kelez said. He added that the facility’s “lithography capabilities will enable the research and development that will define the future of chip manufacturing.” The Albany NanoTech Complex is one of the flagship CHIPS Act research and development facilities that the Commerce Department opened in July. Dubbed the National Semiconductor Technology Center, the facility houses the CHIPS for America Extreme Ultraviolet Accelerator that provides dedicated space and resources to enhance EUV technology and scale up chip manufacturing.
Read more at Manufacturing Dive
UPS, FedEx Up Fuel Surcharge Rates For Domestic, Ground Deliveries
UPS and FedEx announced increases to their fuel surcharge calculations in the midst of the holiday shipping rush, building upon continued pricing pressures for customers. On Monday, FedEx implemented an increase to its fuel surcharge calculations for domestic package and express freight services, along with ground and home delivery offerings. Starting Jan. 5, UPS’ fuel surcharge calculations will increase for similar services such as UPS Ground domestic, Ground Saver and domestic air offerings.
The increases amount to a 1.5% fuel surcharge hike for FedEx and a 1% jump for UPS, according to experts. For parcel carriers, such adjustments can benefit their financial performance. FedEx EVP and Chief Customer Officer Brie Carere said during a Q1 earnings call on Sept. 18 that fuel surcharge index increases have benefited the company’s per-package revenues within a “competitive but rational” pricing environment. “Fuel was very helpful in the first quarter, and that will continue through the year,” Carere said.
Read more at Supply Chain Dive
Trump Administration Backs Bayer's Bid To Curb Roundup Lawsuits
President Donald Trump's administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to take up Bayer’s bid to curtail thousands of lawsuits claiming its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, pushing the group's shares to their highest in almost two years. In a brief filed at the court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer bolstered Bayer’s effort to limit the lawsuits and potentially avert billions of dollars in damages, saying the company was correct that the federal law governing pesticides preempts lawsuits that make claims over the products under state law.
Bayer has asked the justices to hear its appeal of a lower court's decision to uphold a $1.25 million verdict awarded by a St. Louis jury in a Missouri state court case in which a plaintiff named John Durnell sued after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma he attributed to his exposure to Roundup. Bayer is facing more than 67,000 such lawsuits in U.S. state and federal courts. The German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, which acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of Monsanto in 2018, has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe for human use.
Read more at Reuters
Boeing CFO Says Company Expects Higher 737, 787 Deliveries Next Year
Boeing is continuing to express optimism about its business as the company wraps up the year and looks at 2026. Chief Financial Officer Jay Malave said Tuesday at a UBS conference that the company expects deliveries of both its 737 and 787 jets to be up next year. “When you now fast forward to 2026, we’re going to be increasing our deliveries,” Malave said. He added that he expects the certification for the 737-10 aircraft, which is years behind schedule, to come later in 2026.
In July, CEO Kelly Ortberg said the company was beginning to see changes in its business, including slashing its quarterly losses. Boeing saw a strong delivery pace in October, putting it on track for its highest annual delivery total since 2018. The company said its jetliner deliveries drove it back into cash-positive territory for the first time in nearly two years in October. Those deliveries follow a lifting of restrictions by the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing the company to sign off on some of its 737 Max and 787 Dreamliner planes before they reach customers.
Read more at CNBC
Airbus to Inspect Hundreds of A320 Jets for Defective Panels
Airbus is inspecting panels on its bestselling A320 passenger jets after quality control problems surfaced, days after it reported that it was scrambling to fix a separate software problem affecting about 6,000 of the popular planes. The European planemaker said Monday that it “identified a supplier quality issue affecting a limited number” of metal panels on the single-aisle A320 aircraft. “The source of the issue has been identified, contained and all newly produced panels conform to all requirements,” Airbus said in a brief statement.
Airbus sources parts and components from thousands of outside suppliers. The announcement came just hours after it said that the software glitch had been mostly resolved with an update. Travelers had faced minor disruptions heading into the weekend as airlines around the world scrambled to push the software updates out to the widely used commercial jetliner. The European planemaker said the “vast majority” of the short-haul passenger jets in service “have now received the necessary modifications.”
Read more at The AP
Ford U.S. Sales Down Slightly In November As EVs Drag
Ford Motor on Tuesday reported a marginal drop in its U.S. auto sales in November, as sales of its electric vehicles fizzled following the end of tax credits. Demand for electric vehicles has taken a hit after U.S. President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill ended the $7,500 tax credits for new EV purchases in October.
The automaker also had to contend with the impact of a fire at one of the plants of a key aluminum supplier, hitting production of its F-150 Lightning electric pickup.
Sales of Ford’s EVs, such as the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lightning, were down about 61% to 4,247 vehicles in November from last year. Overall sales of the Detroit automaker in the month slipped nearly 1% to 164,925 units from a year earlier.
Read more at CNBC
OpenAI Is Under Pressure As Google, Anthropic Gain Ground
The OpenAI CEO sent a memo to his staffers on Monday outlining a “code red” effort to improve its chatbot ChatGPT, according to multiple reports. Altman said OpenAI will be pulling back on investments in areas like health, shopping and advertising as it works to prioritize ChatGPT, the reports said. “Our focus now is to keep making ChatGPT more capable, continue growing, and expand access around the world — while making it feel even more intuitive and personal,” Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, wrote in a post Monday on X. More than 800 million people use ChatGPT each week, but the company is facing increasingly stiff competition from rivals like Google and Anthropic.
Google announced its latest artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3, last month, which topped industry benchmarks and was widely lauded by users, researchers and developers across social media. The company said its Gemini app has 650 million monthly active users while AI Overviews, which appear at the top of search results, have 2 billion monthly users. Anthropic, meanwhile, has shown strong momentum with enterprises. As of September, the startup said it has more than 300,000 business customers, up from less than 1,000 just two years ago. Large accounts, which Anthropic defines as customers that each represent more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, grew more than seven times in the past year, the company said.
Read more at CNBC
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