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Supply
Chain by the Numbers |
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Feb. 7, 2025
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Amazon getting Closer to Walmart Sales. US PMI Finally Turns Positive in January. Exec Survey on AI in the Supply Chain. Big Changes in Import Parcel Rules |
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$187.7 Billion |
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That was Amazon’s Q4 revenue, according to the company’s earnings call this week. That was up 10% versus Q4 2023, as Amazon moves ever closer to passing Walmart to become the world’s largest corporation, though a growing share of its revenue is from services (web services, logistics, advertising), not ecommerce product sales. Amazon’s stock price actually fell on the good Q4 news, based on a weak Q1 forecast of just 5-9% growth. If the results come in at the lower end of that range it would mark an all-time record low.
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| That amazingly is the number of months that the US Purchasing Managers Index from the Institute for Supply Management had been below the key 50 mark that separates US manufacturing expansion from contraction. But as ISM reported this week, that finally changed, with the PMI for January eking out a gain for the month with a score of 50.9. There was also a positive score for the New Orders Index expanded in January for the third consecutive month after seven months in contraction, registering 55.1, an increase of 3 percentage points compared to December’s seasonally adjusted figure of 52.1, in good news for future US manufacturing activity. |
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1.3 Billion |
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| That is how many parcels came into the US 2024 under so called “de minimis” policies that lets shipments valued at under $800 to come into the country duty free. That under a law first passed in 2016 with a $200 ceiling, later increased to the $800 line. At least that’s how it was. This week, the Trump administration ended the program by executive order. The suspension of de minimis is widely expected to impact new-age Chinese ecommerce companies Temu and Shein. The two low cost etailers have relied on de minimis rules to get goods into the US without duties and tariffs, based on huge numbers of small orders, and have seen tremendous growth. |
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That is the percent of supply chain executives that are making AI a key part of their innovation strategy. That seems low to us, but that’s what a new survey from 3PL Kenco found. Of the 41%, one-third already are leveraging AI for data visibility, 29% for quality control and 26% for labor optimization. However, more than one-in-three (35%) respondents said they are largely prevented from using AI because of company policy (that also seems strange). Among the survey’s other top findings was this: respondents looking to adopt physical automation tools offered an essentially three-way tie for which technology will be most popular in the coming year: robotics (43%), sensors and automatic identification (40%) and 3D printing (40%).
