|
Trade Wars
FedEx to Send Tariff Refunds To Customers Starting In August
FedEx will begin passing refunds on now-defunct tariffs back to customers that originally paid them starting in August, EVP and Chief Customer Officer Brie Carere said in an earnings call Tuesday. FedEx started receiving government-issued refunds for International Emergency Economic Powers Act tariffs on May 11, per the company’s website. The refunds are being sent to FedEx as the importer of record. At the end of the month, FedEx had $800 million in IEEPA tariff refunds slated to go back to customers that originally bore the charges, according to the company’s Q4 earnings report.
“FedEx remains fully committed to remitting all applicable duties — along with any accrued interest received from the U.S. Treasury — as quickly as possible,” according to FedEx’s website. “At the same time, we are managing over 20 million entries with IEEPA duties across hundreds of thousands of accounts.” FedEx said it will launch a portal by July 10 that will allow customers to verify whether a refund for a shipment has been received by the company, along with the refund’s value. Shippers who allow for “sharing limited shipment and refund data with trusted vendor partners” within the portal will be prioritized for disbursement, with initial refunds beginning to be disbursed around Aug. 10, per FedEx.
Read more at Supply Chain Dive
IBM Shows Sub-1-nm Chips, Targeting Production in 5 Years
IBM today announced the world’s first sub-1-nm (0.7-nm) chip manufacturing technology, with initial production expected from IBM partners in five years. The company said its new “nanostack” tech can pack nearly 100 billion transistors on a chip, doubling the density of IBM’s first 2-nm nanosheet device, a 2021 innovation that today has transformed the chip industry. The company expects nanostack to have the same long-lasting impact.
A nanostack includes two transistors in two nanosheets built on top of each other. The nanosheets are about 5 nm high, roughly equivalent to the height of 15 silicon atoms. The distance between the two sheets is 9 nm. The company expects the new tech will help scale logic and SRAM down to smaller dimensions. Earlier this year, IBM and Lam Research announced a partnership to make chips beyond the 1-nm node. The partners have a five-year agreement focused on developing new materials, fabrication processes, and high-NA EUV lithography.
Read more at EE Times
Qualcomm Technologies Agrees To Acquire Modular For $3.9B
Qualcomm has struck a deal to acquire software infrastructure firm Modular for roughly $3.9 billion in an effort to spur adoption of its edge-to-cloud artificial intelligence platforms. According to a securities filing, under the agreement, Qualcomm will issue up to 19.2 million shares of its common stock to the equity owners of Modular. The deal will help Qualcomm “deliver a silicon-agnostic compute layer across devices, edge and data centers,” the company said. It added that this will improve semiconductor performance, increase hardware flexibility and otherwise allow for more efficient AI deployment.
The planned acquisition follows Qualcomm’s agreement last year to purchase Alphawave Semi for $2.4 billion, with the goal of better positioning itself for the AI and data center boom. Along the same lines, its acquisition of Modular reportedly will help it compete with Nvidia in meeting increasing AI demand, Reuters reported. “As AI scales, efficiency, not capability, becomes a constraint,” Qualcomm said in the press release. “Performance-per-watt drives the cost of inference, and cost determines what scales.” According to Qualcomm, in addition to better hardware, meeting demand for AI will require software that “connects system-level optimization with heterogeneous, disaggregated compute, turning silicon performance into reliable and efficient AI services across accelerators, environments, and use cases.”
Read more at Manufacturing Dive
How Ford Turned Around Quality Woes To Become Top Mass-Market Brand In JD Power Quality Study
Ford Motor Co.’s efforts to improve vehicle quality over the past several years are starting to bear fruit. The company has earned the top spot in JD Power’s 2026 U.S. Initial Quality Study among mainstream brands, marking the first time since 2010 that the automaker gained the title. Ford said in a company press release it improved its quality in nearly every vehicle category measured by JD Power, including powertrain reliability.
Ford’s ascent to the top spot comes just three years after it ranked No. 16 in JD Power’s initial quality rankings. That same year, in 2023, Ford created an Industrial System team in which vehicle engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and quality teams work together under one organization, according to a company press release published after JD Power revealed its study Thursday. Since its creation, Ford’s Industrial System team, led by Chief Operating Officer Kumar Galhotra, has worked to break silos between internal teams to find and fix quality issues before they reach customers. This year, the team evolved to become Ford’s new end-to-end Product Creation and Industrialization organization, bringing together the automaker’s digital, design and global industrial teams.
Read more at Ward’s Auto
US Steel Pumping $475 Million Into Fairfield Alabama Operations
U.S. Steel will spend about $475 million to install a new quench and tempering line at its Fairfield tubular operations plant. According to the company, the move will add internal capacity for heat-treated product to support growing demand in the oil and gas industries among new and long-standing customers. The company also plans “significant improvements,” which will include enhanced employee areas and the addition of a training center using virtual reality technology, promoting workforce development and safety. U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt called the plan “a significant milestone in our commitment to American manufacturing excellence.”
Last November, U.S. Steel announced it was installing a new $75 million premium thread line at its Fairfield tubular operations plant, creating 44 jobs. The move was part of a larger push by the company to modernize its plants following the merger with Nippon Steel that was consumated last June. In 2020, U. S. Steel began operating its advanced $412 million electric arc furnace in Fairfield, with the ability to produce 1.6 million tons of steel a year.
Read more at AL.com
Volkswagen Plans To Cut 15% Of Its Workforce And Close Four German Plants, Report Says
Auto giant Volkswagen is planning to cut 100,000 jobs and end production at four German plants over the coming years, according to a report from Manager Magazin, in a move that would represent the most radical overhaul in the firm’s 89-year history. The plan, reported on Friday, would see Europe’s largest automobile manufacturer shed roughly 15% of its workforce as it seeks to counter intensifying competition from Chinese car brands. It would also see the Wolfsburg-headquartered company reduce planned investment in the company by about 15% to just over 130 billion euros ($148.2 billion) over the next five years and cease production at plants in Hanover, Zwickau, Emden, alongside Audi’s Neckarsulm site.
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on “internal, confidential documents” when contacted by CNBC, saying decisions would be taken and approved by the relevant governing bodies, according to a Google translation. “The entire Group—including its brands and subsidiaries—must undergo profound change,” the spokesperson said. Volkswagen’s General Works Council and German industrial union IG Metall pledged to push back against the reported job cuts and plant closures. “If such plans were to be pushed forward, we would prevent them with all our might,” they said in a joint statement. Volkswagen had a workforce of about 657,400 employees at the end of the first quarter of 2026, according to the company.
Read more at CNBC
Onsemi To Buy Synaptics In $7 Billion All-Stock Deal
ON Semiconductor Corp said on Thursday it had agreed to acquire Synaptics in an all-stock deal valued at about $7 billion, its largest acquisition to date, as the chipmaker seeks to expand its presence in AI-enabled devices and so-called physical AI. Under the terms of the agreement, Synaptics shareholders will receive 1.350 shares of Onsemi common stock for each Synaptics share. The exchange ratio represents a 19% premium based on the 10-day volume-weighted average closing prices of the two companies’ stocks.
The acquisition is aimed at accelerating growth in so-called physical AI, which refers to AI embedded in devices and machines. Synaptics’ connected-computing platform complements Onsemi’s strengths in automotive, power and industrial markets, Onsemi CEO Hassane El-Khoury told Reuters in an interview. Onsemi expects the deal to help increase the size of the markets it can target by $30 billion, to $243 billion by 2030. The chipmaker also aims to capture growth from Synaptics’ human‑machine interface business and its broader technology and R&D in robotics and humanoid markets, El-Khoury said.
Read more at Reuters
Pentagon Issues $35B to Lockheed for Missiles
Lockheed Martin has a new, seven-year contract from the U.S. Missile Defense Agency to manufacture THAAD interceptor missiles, with a total value of $35.33 billion. The award is the first for Lockheed following the seven-year framework agreements that the Pentagon extended to three defense contractors in March, seeking to incentivize them to accelerate ballistic missile production. Prior to the framework agreement, Lockheed drew a seven-year contract to triple its output of Patriot anti-ballistic missile systems.
The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor missiles have infrared sensors located in the nose to detect, track, and lock onto incoming ballistic missiles during their final, terminal phase. They involve high-sensitivity infrared technology that guides missiles to destroy threats by kinetic impact rather than explosives. Lockheed will manufacture the missiles at a new plant under construction now in Troy, Ala., and at plants in Dallas, Sunnyvale, Calif., and Camden, Ark. The MDA contract stated that missile production capacity will increase from 96 interceptors per year to 400 per year over seven years. Estimates place the total number of THAAD interceptors to be produced under the new award at 2,000 to 2,300 over seven years.
Read more at American Machinist
America Can’t Get Enough Of Protein. The Dairy Industry Can’t Keep Up
America’s “protein-maxxing” obsession is stressing the dairy industry. Whey protein concentrate, once considered a cheap byproduct of the cheese manufacturing process, has become one of the most in-demand ingredients in the American diet. The surge is creating nationwide shortages, with some suppliers sold out for the latter half of the year, according to a USDA report from late April. U.S. whey protein end-of-month inventories have fallen by roughly half since 2023.
With the boom in use of GLP-1 weight loss drugs — which is poised to expand across many more Americans due to Medicare coverage — protein consumption is headed higher at least in the short term. Use of these drugs requires users to increase protein consumption to avoid muscle loss. And that continued expansion of weight-loss drug coverage comes at a time when protein is already in high demand among Americans in many consumable forms. “It’s a multi-dimensional supply exercise,” said Phil Plourd, dairy analyst at Ever.Ag. “Supply has grown, but it is hard for it to grow as fast as demand,” he said.
Read more at CNBC
|
