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Trade Wars
Small Businesses are Rethinking Supplier Sourcing Strategies
A recent survey, Scaling Small: Inside the Enterprise Push to Source Smarter and Stay Competitive, found that 91% of executives say they have adjusted their sourcing strategies or plan to do so in the next six months. One tactic is to increase sourcing from U.S.-based small suppliers, which 71% of the respondents plan to do. Furthermore, 17% have reshored or are in the process of reshoring production to unlock new small local business opportunities in the future. Additionally, 26% report increasing sourcing from non-US small businesses.
Almost every leader (96%) said they would source more from small suppliers if finding, vetting, and onboarding were easier. Yet, regardless of revenue, according to Supplier.io platform data, companies only allocate an average of 7% of their organization’s spend towards small suppliers. The issue isn’t a lack of interest; it’s a lack of infrastructure.
Read more at Material Handling & Logistics
Toyota Global Sales Climb In August, Powered By US Growth Despite Trump's Tariffs
Toyota (TM) reported another bump-up in global sales for August, with the US consumer powering the gains. The world’s largest automaker by volume said global sales rose 2.2% in August year over year to nearly 845,000 units sold, with the company marking its eighth straight month of sales gains. Toyota’s year-to-date sales through August hit 6.9 million units, up 5% compared to last year. The US, the largest market for the Japanese automaker, marked the biggest gains for Toyota.
Sales in August hit 225,367 units sold in the US, a 13.6% jump compared to a year ago. Year-to-date sales were up 7.2%, just above 1.68 million units sold. In China, Toyota’s other major market, sales were essentially flat. The company cited an “ongoing severe market environment, including a shift to new energy vehicles and intensifying price competition,” as reasons for minimal growth. Toyota did say the company’s promotions tied to Chinese subsidies, as well as strong sales of Toyota’s bZ3X electric vehicle, helped its performance.
Read more at Yahoo Finance
GSK’s Walmsley to step down early as insider Luke Miels named next CEO
GSK’s CEO Emma Walmsley will step down in December and be replaced by insider Luke Miels, the British drugmaker said on Monday, tasking the new leader to deliver shareholder value and prepare for the next wave of R&D. Since taking over in 2017, she has overseen the separation of consumer healthcare group Haleon and turned GSK’s focus to cancer and infectious diseases as she drove efforts to counter a combination of patent expiries and declining revenue from its best-selling medicines by 2030. However, she has struggled to win over investors due to concerns about GSK’s drug pipeline.
“2026 is a pivotal year for GSK to define its path for the decade ahead, and I believe the right moment for new leadership,” said Walmsley, 56. Miels will be tasked with leading the company into this new phase and delivering GSK’s annual sales target of more than 40 billion pounds ($53.76 billion) by 2031, despite a challenging economic and geopolitical backdrop that includes potential U.S. tariffs on the sector. Miels, 50, joined GSK in 2017 and is currently the drugmaker’s chief commercial officer, overseeing the company’s global medicines and vaccines portfolio.
Read more at CNBC
Auto Parts Maker First Brands Files For Bankruptcy, Revealing Billions Of Dollars In Liabilities
U.S. auto parts maker First Brands filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday after disclosing liabilities exceeding $10 billion, marking the collapse of a company who’s rapidly deteriorating finances have shocked debt investors in recent weeks. First Brands is expected to soon disclose an issue with its factoring arrangements amounting to nearly $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. The company's board and creditors are investigating the issue, one of these people said, confirming an earlier report in the Wall Street Journal. Factoring is a financing method that is tied to the future revenue of a company.
Privately held First Brands, which makes replacement components including filters, brakes and lighting systems for the automotive aftermarket, emerged as a significant player in the industry through debt-financed acquisitions of rival auto parts makers. The high-profile collapse of First Brands has raised questions among investors about potential ripple effects across the automotive parts industry, although experts said automaker supply chains are not likely to be affected broadly.
Read more at Reuters
Trump Is Wielding The Power Of The State To Back Critical Mineral Companies
The Trump administration needs to strike multiple deals with U.S. miners to secure the nation’s supply chain against China, said Mark Chalmers, CEO of Energy Fuels, a miner focused on uranium and rare earth minerals. The Pentagon decision to take an equity stake in MP Materials, the largest U.S. rare earth miner, in July and support the company with a price floor surprised many in the industry, Chalmers told CNBC. The White House is “not ruling out other deals with equity stakes or price floors as we did with MP Materials, but that doesn’t mean every initiative we take would be in the shape of the MP deal,” a Trump administration official told CNBC.
Rare earths are key inputs in weapons platforms such as the F-35 warplane as well as consumer products like electric vehicles and smartphones. The U.S. is almost entirely dependent on China, which supplied 70% of rare earth imports in 2023, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. China has manipulated the market by suppressing prices to drive Western competition from the market, said Ryan Castilloux, founder of Adamas Intelligence, a critical mineral market research firm. The MP deal demonstrated that the U.S. is willing to break with free market ideals and push back against China by mimicking its model of strategic capitalism when necessary, Castilloux said.
Read more at CNBC
Modine Manufacturing To Expand To New Plant, Hire 300 Workers
Modine Manufacturing, a maker of thermal management systems used in the booming data center industry, is expanding to a new, 153,000-square-foot location in Franklin, Wisconsin. While plans for the new plant have been known since the city announced it in January, a more recent statement from the company adds new details, including an estimated total headcount of 300 employees by March 2026. According to that statement, Modine has immediate openings for 55 hires for entry level assemblers, welders, production leaders, engineers, and other positions.
In July, Modine announced it would spend a total of $100 million to expand its capacity for data center thermal control products to keep up with increasing demand. Data centers, including those used to train and operate “AI” software, generate heat and need to be cooled: Those cooling systems can demand enough water and electricity to seriously tax local infrastructure. According to Urban Milwaukee, the new Franklin plant will build huge coolers that weigh as much as 33,000 pounds.
Read more at Plant Services
Volvo’s Most Popular Vehicle in America Will Soon Be Made Here, Too
Volvo Car’s only U.S. factory was supposed to bring 4,000 jobs to this area 30 miles northwest of Charleston. Today half that number run a single daily shift building expensive electric vehicles. That is about to change thanks, in part, to the Trump administration’s tariffs. Starting next year the Swedish automaker will crank up production of its most popular SUV in America—the XC60—at this $1.3 billion plant set among the swamps and evergreen trees of the South Carolina low country. For years that model has been shipped to the U.S. from Sweden, but the new 15% levy on foreign imports makes it worthwhile to move its manufacturing to the U.S., Chief Executive Håkan Samuelsson said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Volvo’s XC60 SUV comes in two versions, a standard gasoline-electric hybrid and a more expensive plug-in hybrid. Combined, the two have notched more than 27,000 sales in the U.S. so far this year, a nearly 20% increase over 2024. The company is adding more hybrid models to the Ridgeville factory because American car buyers proved slow to give up their gas-powered vehicles.
Read more at the WSJ
EY: Regulatory Uncertainty Slowing US Electric Vehicle Adoption
Elimination of buyer incentives combined with regulatory uncertainty is expected to slow domestic electric vehicle adoption as the technology advances in other global markets, a forecasting model has found. This is according to consulting firm EY’s September 2025 “EY Mobility Lens Forecaster,” an AI-powered modeling tool developed to predict electric vehicle adoption timelines in the key U.S., China and EU markets through 2050. For the U.S. market, EY’s forecaster projects EV adoption will begin to slow with the elimination of the federal EV tax credit on Sept. 30, as well as from tariffs and other legislative uncertainty surrounding the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which was approved by Congress in July.
In addition, factors such as escalating trade tensions, rare earth shortages are expected to further slow EV adoption in the U.S. to a more moderate pace year over year, from 7.3% in 2024, to under 2% annually each year through 2030. EVs are projected to account for only 11% of all U.S. light vehicle sales by 2029 as a result of “policy roadblocks,” according to EY’s data. Still, EVs are on track to reach 32% of U.S. light vehicle sales by 2035.
Read more at Automotive Dive
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