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Supply Chain by the Numbers

Jan. 8, 2026

Supply Chain by the Numbers for Jan. 8, 2026

Mexico Benefits from Tariffs. US Manufacturing Contracts again in December. Ohio Town Says No to Amazon. Big Lobster Cargo Theft


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25%
That is the approximately how much Mexico has captured of the reduction in the US trade deficit with China, a decline which of course was largely the result of the Trump tariffs. That makes Mexico the big winner of the tariff saga, according to a Dec. 26 article by the Wall Street Journal. Key factors in Mexico’s rise include (1) lower effective tariff rates - while rivals like China face an average effective tariff of 37.1%, Mexico’s rate is significantly lower at 4.7%; and (2) USMCA protection - almost 85% of Mexican exports remain tariff-free due to the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

$4 Billion

That’s how much Amazon’s AWS web services unit said it will invest in building a data center in the city of Wilmington in southwest Ohio, creating 100+ well-paid jobs and a total payroll of some $8 billion annually. But data center plans met with fierce opposition from local residents, which in November led to a decision by Town Planning Commission to table a vote on whether to allow the project – the same result as this week, when a vote was again taken, The decision to table the project was unanimous after a three-hour meeting and was consistent with the city staff's recommendations. The next meeting is on January 15. The data center campus would be built on a 471-acre property and involve Amazon investing $25 million in pubic infrastructure.



36
That is how months out of the last 38 that the US Purchasing Managers Index from the Institute for Supply Management has been below the key 50 score that indicates manufacturing expansion. That trend continued in December, with a PMI of 47.9, down a little from 48.2 in November and still showing contraction, according to the ISM report released late last week. Other economic indicators in the month were mostly down. The New Orders Index contracted for a fourth straight month in December following one month of growth; the figure of 47.7 just is a bit higher than the 47.4 recorded in November, in bad news for future US manufacturing activity. However, the November level of the Production Index (51.0) is 0.4 percentage points lower than November’s figure of 51.4, but is still above 50 level for the second straight month.



$400,000
In a story from December we just caught up with this week, that was the value of a load of frozen lobsters destined for Costco stores in Illinois and Minnesota was stolen by a fraudulent trucking company. These fraud-base thefts, increasingly managed by organized crime, are a key driver of the rapid growth of cargo theft activity, experts and victim companies say. “The carrier we hired impersonated a real carrier,” Dylan Rexing, CEO of Rexing Companies, the victim of the lobster theft as a 3PL, told ABC News, adding that “They had a spoofed email address. They changed the name on the side of the truck. They made a fake certified driver’s license. It’s a very sophisticated crime.”

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