Construction + Economy

  According to US Census Bureau data, September national nonresidential construction spending grew 0.3% marketing the 16th consecutive month of growth. The growth is primarily attributed to publicly financed construction. Some private categories, including power, commercial, amusement, and recreation saw month-over-month increases, however, publicly financed construction accounted for more than 72% of September’s rise. Federal [...]

  The US Department of Transportation awarded $653 million in grants on November 3rd to upgrade 41 water-based ports around the country. The funding is through the Port Infrastructure Development Program, which provides planning support, capital funding and project management assistance, and comes from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). The projects will boost [...]

  Big box retailers are increasingly opening smaller format stores. Historically, the largest retailers have been continually increasing the size of stores, in some cases as large as 500,000 square feet. However, many of the largest retailers are increasingly testing smaller footprint locations. This includes Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Kohl’s, and others. In the case of [...]

  In the lighting world, we usually think of reducing carbon by increasing efficiency of energy use. However, there is a new push to reduce the carbon used to create construction materials, known as embodied carbon. This matters in the fight against climate change. Building materials and construction comprise about 11% of global energy carbon [...]

I’ve written previous articles about the gradual shift in US imports away from China toward Mexico, India, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, here and here. The above chart is courtesy of DigiTimes Research. It projects India’s production value of LED lighting to rise from $2.2 Billion USD in 2020 to $16.2 Billion in 2025. That’s [...]

For a variety of reasons, Taiwanese businesses are reducing their investments in mainland China. One reason is the difficulties China faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the extreme challenges that were specific to China, including their unprecedented extended shutdowns of large commercial cities such as Shanghai, among others. Many larger, Taiwanese companies have been relocating [...]

  The number of existing homes sold, from January through August of this year, dropped 21% compared with the same period last year. And that’s on top of an 18% decline last year from two years ago. The data is from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). For the month of August, home sales fell [...]

  I’ve previously written several posts on the reduction of trade between the US and China. This is largely caused by the escalating and evolving trade war. Companies in a growing number of industries are managing Chinese sourcing risk by adopting the stragegy of diversifying their supply chain to include China plus another source outside [...]

  The economic rebound from the pandemic created a chaotic freight nightmare. Those days are behind us, but new factors are beginning to drive freight costs back up again, both for bringing goods in from Asia to the US, as well as sending freight within the US. Here are some causes: Labor – The feared [...]