#supply-chain

#supply-chain

Walk into a Ralphs supermarket in California or a King Soopers in Colorado, and you might get a feeling vaguely familiar to shopping at Kroger. The signs are different, the store layout isn't quite the same, and local products mingle with store-brand ones - but the shopping experience still has a Kroger-ish ambiance. There's a reason for that, and you might not like it. About 20 favorite "hometown" regional grocery brands across America are actually part of the same huge Kroger family.

But beyond their sky-high resale price, the viral collectibles may come with a steep humanitarian cost as well. As The Guardian reports, New York-based labor rights group China Labor Watch (CLW) has accused the toys' maker, Chinese toy manufacturer Pop Mart, of employing 16- and 17-year-olds without offering them the necessary labor protections required by Chinese law. The group also alleges that these young workers aren't given adequate health and safety training, among other labor rights violations at the company's factory in Jiangxi province.

As part of the ruling, the High Court ordered Dyson to disclose a series of documents previously referenced in now-discontinued defamation proceedings brought by Dyson against Channel 4 News and ITN over reporting on alleged labour abuses. The documents to be disclosed include internal meeting minutes between Dyson and ATA in 2021, audit reports carried out between 2019 and 2021, correspondence from Dyson's chief legal officer, and records relating to requests for workers to work on rest days to increase production volumes.

In the last several weeks of 2025 alone, nuclear startups raised $1.1 billion, largely on investor optimism that smaller nuclear reactors will succeed where the broader industry has recently stumbled. Traditional nuclear reactors are massive pieces of infrastructure. The newest reactors built in the U.S. - Vogtle 3 and 4 in Georgia - contain tens of thousands of tons of concrete, are powered by fuel assemblies 14 feet tall, and generate over 1 gigawatt of electricity each.

Co-CEO of Samsung's mobile division, TM Roh, spoke to the media at the CES 2026 trade show, saying "We're facing one of the harshest pricing situations in memory" and warning that "smartphone price adjustments may be necessary". Samsung is working with other companies in its supply chain to try and deal with the situation in the long term as all kinds of electronics are affected by this - notably smartphones, but also TVs and other smart devices.

It's been 15 years since this comic first ran in January 2011, and there's something both quaint and timeless about it.Here's to more (and more) transparency in 2026, and happy New Year!

Global supply chains move over $15T in goods annually, yet the retail industry operates on razor-thin margins while drowning in disconnected, siloed data that creates massive inefficiencies and waste. When retailers and CPG brands lack real-time visibility into sales, inventory, and supply chain performance, the results cascade throughout the system: out-of-stocks cost the industry billions in lost sales, overstock leads to food waste on an epic scale, and manual data processes consume resources that could drive strategic growth.

In April, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced the country's aerospace industry could see sustained annual growth of as much as 15 percent over the next four years, and attributed the sector's expansion to a robust local manufacturing workforce, increasing exports, and a strong presence of foreign companies. Mexico is striving to become one of the top 10 countries in aerospace production value, a goal outlined in Plan Mexico, the country's strategic initiative to enhance global competitiveness in key sectors.

High-power magnets undergird an enormous amount of modern society. From high-end audio speakers to electric vehicles, wind turbines, and fighter jets, they are a vital component in much of the technology we touch every day. To make them requires mining and refining rare earth elements -a supply chain largely controlled by China. Companies around the world are racing to find alternatives by using materials that are more abundant and cheaper to produce domestically. Minneapolis-based Niron Magnetics believes it has found a solution, claiming it can approach key aspects of rare earth magnet performance, using humble iron and nitrogen-albeit in an exotic formulation.

The mall staple was able to get ahead of tariff impacts during the first half of the year through preemptive actions, Chief Financial Officer Voin Todorovic said in a statement Thursday, but the levies caught up to the company in its most recent quarter and will continue to weigh on its performance into 2026. "We expect this elevated level of impact to continue through the fourth quarter and into the next fiscal year," Todorovic said.

When the British designer Fred Rigby released his first furniture collection in 2021, he knew from the outset he would prioritize a U.S. audience-a bigger market with more sales opportunities, he says. Rigby designs and manufactures elegantly crafted furniture in the Oxfordshire countryside, and has built strong relationships with interior designer clients in cities like New York, L.A. and Miami.

In DRC's perilous mines, Eagle Mujinga walks a tightrope, protecting workers' welfare to supply international demand for cobalt. Eagle Mujinga manages workers at Shabara cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). As the world's biggest producer of cobalt, the DRC is a part of the chain that fuels electric vehicles and renewable energy worldwide. Miners in the DRC face dangerous working conditions and earn, on average, a few dollars per day to supply the multibillion-dollar industry.

Between the COVID-19 pandemic and all the subsequent supply-chain headaches that caused prices to skyrocket, followed by tariffs on foreign goods nowadays, people are starting to really wonder when they're going to catch a financial break. What's worse is that even saving money at Costco - a haven to which many families have flocked for years in search of cheap, good-quality food - has become challenging as of late.

Dell Technologies Inc., HP Inc. and other tech companies are warning of potential memory-chip supply shortages in the coming year due to soaring demand from the buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Consumer electronics makers including Xiaomi Corp. have sounded the alarm about potential price increases, while others including Lenovo Group Ltd. have begun stockpiling memory chips in anticipation of rising costs. Counterpoint Research this month forecast a 50% price rise for memory modules through the second quarter of next year.

The price of some cloud services will have to rise by five to ten percent by mid-2026, maybe sooner, according to Octave Klaba, CEO of French cloud OVH. In a weekend post to his X account, Klaba opened with the observation that the price of RAM and NVMe drives will increase significantly in around six months. The CEO attributed that increase to demand for AI hardware, which he said has seen memory-makers shift production to the HBM memory used in GPUs.

In reality, rare earths aren't that rare, but just difficult to extract and refine. Yet they've become indispensable to modern life, embedded in everything from our smartphones and electric-vehicle motors to wind turbines and medical imaging machines. And demand is climbing. The real choke point is processing and refining a complex and environmentally sensitive step that the U.S. has lagged behind in and that China now dominates, controlling nearly 90% of global output.

"When I said, 'I'm disappointed that it isn't going to follow a console pricing model where it's subsidized by the fact that the manufacturer is going to be taking 30% of every game sold on it over the lifespan of this thing, because I feel that would be a more meaningful product,' they kind of asked what I meant by, well, 'What do you mean by console price?' And I said, 'Well, $500,'" he said, as reported by IGN.

Luminar faces potential bankruptcy as Volvo backs off its promise to make lidar standard in its flagship models. Volvo blamed "limited supply of the lidar hardware." Luminar has already warned investors that it may run out of cash by the end of Q1 2026. Not long ago, Volvo and Luminar seemed like the perfect partnership. The Swedish automaker pushed a safety-first approach that used the startup's laser-based sensors to ensure its vehicles were safer than ever.

Keychain connects over 20,000 brands and retailers with 30,000 vetted manufacturers through AI-powered matching technology that eliminates these bottlenecks, turning product ideas into structured, searchable data that accelerates sourcing from months to days. The platform launched KeychainOS for manufacturers in February 2024, then immediately faced demand from retailers who needed the same end-to-end visibility for their private label programs- a signal that drove the company to develop Keychain360, a supply chain management platform designed specifically for retail private label operations.

Reactive personalization is being replaced by predictive intent engines. Instead of waiting for a customer to browse, AI anticipates the customer's next wants based on contextual data like weather, life events, and even local cultural moments. For example, as outdoor searches tick upward in specific regions, retailers surface camping gear. The upside is deeper relevance. As with every trend, there are risks. Here, if the timing is too perfect, the relevance can feel intrusive to the customer.

Enthusiasm for corporate sustainability appears to be waning, with major firms seemingly quietly abandoning environmental goals, but David Picton remains optimistic. For him, sustainability is not an ethical question, but a business driver. A self-described "demon for cutting down on food waste" at home, Picton is senior vice-president of environment, social and governance (ESG) and sustainability at EcoOnline, a company that develops software tools to help organisations protect workers, meet environmental regulations, and embed sustainable practices.

Norfolk, Virginia based Mutant Inc. are stepping up their game to fill the new supply chain void created by tariffs. With departing Chinese suppliers no longer able to compete due to the reciprocal tariffs, Mutant Inc. is taking over supplying batteries and other energy solutions for clients old and new, which may include such entities as Stanley Black & Decker (NYSE: SWK), international telecom companies, major utilities, and others.

"I am honored to be leading I9 and our family of companies into the next chapter of business," says Dustin Adams, "Our deep history in North American Manufacturing has established roots that position us better than anyone else in the industry today. With the recent acquisition of We Are One, Industry Nine will be the only brand to have full control and ownership of its wheel business in the USA."