M. Holland will be exhibiting at MD&M West in Anaheim, California, from April 12-14. MD&M West is the largest medtech conference in the U.S. If you’re attending, please stop by Booth #4111 to meet our Healthcare experts!
In case you missed it, watch M. Holland’s Plastics Reflections webinar about the current and future state of the North American plastics industry. Click here to access the recording.
M. Holland’s 3D Printing group offers a rapid response alternative for producing selected parts where resin availability is tight. For more information, email our 3D Printing team.
Market Expertise: M. Holland offers a host of resources to clients, prospects and suppliers across nine strategic markets.
Supply
Oil prices rose 2% Friday but ended the week about 1% lower, their second straight weekly decline. For several weeks, the benchmarks have been the most volatile since the beginning of the pandemic.
In mid-morning trading today, WTI futures were down 3.9% at $67.40/bbl, Brent was down 4.0% at $98.64/bbl, and U.S. natural gas was up 4.5% at $6.56/MMBtu.
U.S. producers added 13 oil rigs last week, the third straight week of gains, with the count 59% higher than the same time last year.
U.S. crude reserves will fall to a four-decade low after the latest release of 120 million barrels is completed.
U.S. gasoline prices were 20% higher in March than in February.
Natural gas prices at the U.S.’s main trading hub are up 64% this year, the highest since 2008, with surging foreign demand likely to keep exports strong for years.
Pennsylvania-based Talen Energy is expected to file for bankruptcy within weeks after struggling with added hedging costs from rising natural gas prices.
Congestion at China’s ports are growing exponentially amid the lockdowns in Shanghai, with 222 bulk cargo ships waiting off the city’s coast, and 477 vessels waiting throughout the country.
Canadian construction firm Aecon was awarded a $170 million contract to modernize cargo facilities in the Caribbean port of Saint Vincent and Grenadines.
The latest Logistics Managers’ Index advanced for a third straight month to 76.2 in March, an all-time high, as U.S. supply chains face more pressure from scarce warehouse space and high inventory costs.
Trucking contractors and ride-share drivers are looking for greater compensation to help offset surging fuel costs.
Some Americans are pushing back against a warehouse boom they say disrupts communities with industrial traffic and pollution, as companies have added a record 1.6 billion square feet of new industrial space across the country since 2017.
Despite the global chip shortage, sales of graphic processing units rose almost 30% in 2021 from a year ago.
Auto sales in China fell by more than 10% in March to 1.58 million vehicles as the nation’s strict pandemic measures hampered both auto production and consumer purchases.
Google’s drone unit Wing launched its newest and largest delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth area last Thursday, which will transport everything from Walgreens medicines to local ice cream.
U.S. online grocery sales are falling sharply from pandemic highs, with the ship-to-home segment seeing the largest drop of 30% in March from a year ago.
More supply chain news related to the war in Europe:
The EU’s latest round of sanctions will slash 10% of Russian imports, including coal, wood and chemicals, officials say.
A United Nations gauge of global good prices rose 13% in March to a fresh record as the war in Ukraine chokes crop supplies. Acute hunger across the globe could spread to affect as many as 47 million more people if war is prolonged, officials say.
Unlike many western companies that closed operations in Ukraine at the start of the war, German auto maker Leoni AG remains open with defiant employees continuing to show up for work between Russian attacks.
Domestic Markets
The U.S. has averaged 28,169 daily new COVID-19 cases over the past seven days, along with 516 daily deaths from the virus.
COVID-19 cases have doubled in Washington, D.C., and are up 60% in New York City since the last week of March. Incomplete data reporting could be masking an upward trend in many other regions such as North Dakota, which stopped reporting dozens of metrics last month.
After several weeks of continued decline, COVID-19 vaccinations in the U.S. trended upwards in the first eight days of April, with the average number of vaccinations administered more than doubling from 214,405 per day on March 30 to 485,505 per day April 8.
The U.S. COVID-19 vaccine program has prevented 2.2 million deaths, 17 million hospitalizations and 66.1 additional infections, new estimates show.
The U.S. Federal Reserve signaled it could raise the benchmark interest rate by another three percentage points by the end of the year.
Economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal put the probability of a U.S. recession sometime in the next year at 28%, up from 18% in January.
After U.S. consumers stashed away more than $5 trillion in bank deposits during the pandemic, a 35% gain, banks could see their first decline in deposits since WWII as savers seek higher returns amid rising interest rates.
Safety experts are expressing concerns about the seismic shift of automakers building electric vehicles, saying that their increased size and power could lead to a rise in collisions and pedestrian fatalities.
Shanghai continued lockdowns and imposed a fresh round of mass testing after health authorities recorded the eighth straight day of record COVID-19 cases on Saturday. Cases remained high on Sunday, as officials sought to assure residents that shortages of food and essentials would ease. Despite recording over 130,000 infections, the city has not reported any deaths from the virus in that time, and only one reported case of someone with severe disease.
Canada imposed new sanctions on Russia’s defense sector Monday and is reportedly examining additional measures it can take in response to the nation’s invasion of Ukraine.
While encouraging war dissenters to leave the country, Russia is offering incentives to tech workers to stay after an estimated 300,000 young professionals fled the country since the start of the war. The brain drain follows the loss of 500,000 young professionals in 2021.
Brazil’s monthly inflation jumped 1.62% from February to March, the fastest pace in almost 30 years.
Canadian unemployment fell to its lowest level ever in March at 5.3%.
New Zealand’s rental car inventory is 40% of pre-pandemic levels at best, a poignant example of the pandemic’s widespread effects on the auto industry.
Almost a quarter of air traffic controllers in Warsaw, Poland, walked off the job last month over contract disputes.
IKEA is investing $373 million into nine solar parks in Germany and Spain, part of a long-term plan to generate more renewable energy than it consumes.
Issuance of sustainability focused bonds fell 19% in the first quarter from a year ago, mainly on inflation concerns and supply disruptions, new data shows.
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