According to Andreas Hermann, head of freighters for the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, the economic recovery is spurring additional need for more passenger and cargo aircraft, which he expects to drive a need for the aircraft manufacturing industry over the next two decades. Though the recovery and growth is slow, it is there. Airbus is a…
Is the retail giant losing customer sales? Or maybe they’re just cutting back on general merchandise orders to make room for holiday items? Perhaps they simply lack the staff to get all the inventory out of the back storage room and onto the floors and shelves? Whatever the reason, the fact is Wal-Mart has sent…
When the Rust Belt in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and other northern, heavily unionized states began to decline and lose jobs to non-unionized right to work states in the south, such as Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, many blamed the unions. Even as automakers struggled financially, unions hurt their chances of survival…
The government shutdown, combined with new acts of terrorism along the Suez canal, and the normal incidents of piracy combine to complicate shipping endeavors worldwide. According to sources at the Port of Savannah, where all eleven Suez shipping services call upon for shipments to the eastern coast of the United States, 6,000 of the approximate…
According to Joachim Grieg & Co., just as the widened Panama Canal increases vessel capacity and reduces the number of vessels needed to transport liquid petroleum gasses from the United States to Asia, ship builders are flooding the market with new ships. Together, the situations could lead to the eventual collapse of the shipping industry’s…
Package engineering has long been the least glamorous element of manufacturing. It isn’t as snazzy as marketing, is less glorious than production, and not seemingly as challenging as transportation. But package engineering is emerging as a sought after degree in business schools, and the impacts of smart package design go beyond purely functional, playing into…
According to the American Trucking Association, truck freight rose slightly (1.4 percent) during the month of August. This comes on the heels of a slight downturn in July (0.6 percent), but is the third month within the past four months that freight rose, which is a positive indicator.
The trend toward bringing manufacturing jobs, which have moved toward cheaper labor pools in developing nations for decades, back to the U.S. to produce more American jobs and higher quality products is well underway. In the midst of this influx of new jobs lies the garment industry, where small to medium-sized clothing designers and manufacturers…
Carriers have taken measures to try to improve security, including beefing up their technologies, internal processes, and employee training. Yet theft of cargo still continues to rise. During the three-month period between June and August of this year, cargo theft rose by five percent, while the value of the cargo stolen rose by nine percent….
Ship owners are having to be more careful about what companies they trade with, under threat from their banks to cancel loans when the owner enters contracts with companies the bank believes to be at risk of defaulting on contracts. This means shippers are having to settle for shorter term contracts with an increasingly smaller…