Current Affairs
January 25, 2026
Plywood Anti-Dumping Update
Commerce Department rules in favor of preliminary countervailing duties in hardwood plywood cases
By Larry Adams
January 22, 2026 | 8:49 am CST
Prevailing countervailing duties on hardwood plywood imports from China, Indonesia and Vietnam have been calculated.
On January 16, the U.S. Department of Commerce released its preliminary affirmative countervailing duty findings on hardwood and decorative plywood after identifying significant subsidies provided by the governments of China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, reports the Decorative Hardwoods Association.
Commerce calculated preliminary countervailing duties of 81.34% on imports from China, 2.40% to 128.66% on imports from Indonesia, and 4.37% to 26.75% on imports from Vietnam. These rates will be added to existing tariffs on products from these countries and will be charged as soon as the decision is published in the Federal Register.
In addition, preliminary antidumping rates are scheduled to be announced in late February 2026. Final rulings are expected in early May.
The Coalition for Fair Trade in Hardwood Plywood (Coalition), representing a substantial majority of the American hardwood and decorative plywood industry, commends Commerce for its decision to impose these preliminary duties to remedy the unfair trade practices of China, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
“The domestic hardwood and decorative plywood industry has been harmed for decades by unfairly traded imports from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Friday’s decision by the Department of Commerce is another critical step in leveling the playing field for American hardwood and decorative plywood manufacturers,” said Timothy C. Brightbill, lead counsel to the Coalition and co-chair of Wiley’s International Trade Practice.
As soon as Commerce’s preliminary determination is published in the Federal Register, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will begin collecting preliminary duties on entries of hardwood and decorative plywood from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Commerce also found that critical circumstances exist with respect to imports of hardwood and decorative plywood from China. As a result, duties will be collected on entries of hardwood and decorative plywood from China that were entered on or after 90 days before publication of the preliminary determination.
Commerce’s countervailing duty investigations will continue over the coming months, with the agency further investigating subsidies—including newly alleged subsidy programs—received by the Chinese, Indonesian, and Vietnamese industries. Commerce’s final determination is currently scheduled for early May 2026. Commerce is also simultaneously investigating antidumping duty allegations on hardwood and decorative plywood from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The preliminary antidumping rates are scheduled to be announced in late February 2026.
The duties that will now be imposed are assessed on the importer of record of the covered merchandise. Duty evasion, absorption, and circumvention are illegal and closely monitored by CBP, in conjunction with the Commerce Department. Counsel for the Coalition is working closely with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to share evidence of duty evasion, which is leading to heightened scrutiny of imports.
January 22, 2026
Automotive Outlook for 2026
2026 Looks Better For US Automakers Than Suppliers; Deutsche Bank
by Tyler Durden
Thursday, Jan 22, 2026 – 03:20 PM
Deutsche Bank is looking at U.S. autos heading into the new year with a growing sense of separation between winners and laggards. In a new 2026 outlook note, Edison Yu and his team argue that while global auto demand remains uneven and suppliers face a tougher volume backdrop, U.S. automakers are entering the year with clearer earnings momentum, helped by better mix, lower EV losses, and a renewed ability to lean into their most profitable internal-combustion vehicles.
At a high level, the bank is cautious on global production growth despite more optimistic industry forecasts. Deutsche Bank sees downside risks tied mainly to China, where changes to government trade-in subsidies are expected to hit lower-priced vehicles hardest. While North America and Europe may improve modestly, the team does not believe those regions can fully offset a potential slowdown in China. As a result, suppliers are likely to guide conservatively for 2026, particularly in the first half of the year, even though fourth-quarter results should generally meet or exceed expectations.
In contrast, the setup for U.S. automakers looks more favorable. Deutsche Bank expects both GM and Ford to deliver solid fourth-quarter results and to grow EBIT by roughly $1–2 billion year over year in 2026. The key driver is not higher unit volumes, but a shift in mix. With regulatory pressure easing, automakers no longer need to restrict production of high-margin trucks and SUVs to meet fleet-wide emissions targets. That flexibility allows them to stock dealerships with more profitable trims, improving margins even if overall sales volumes remain flat or modestly lower.
The pullback from aggressive EV expansion is another important theme. Both Ford and GM have taken multi-billion-dollar write-downs tied to EV programs and battery investments. Deutsche Bank views these moves as painful but necessary resets that reduce future losses, depreciation, and overhead. By clearing out what the bank refers to as “stranded assets,” both companies enter 2026 with a cleaner cost base and a much easier earnings comparison year over year.
For EV-focused companies, the conversation shifts away from near-term vehicle volumes and toward technology execution. Deutsche Bank expects muted underlying volume growth for Tesla and Rivian, with investor attention increasingly centered on autonomy, software, and what the team describes as “physical AI.” For Tesla, that means proving real-world progress in unsupervised full self-driving and robotaxi deployment before earning additional valuation credit. For Rivian, 2026 is framed as a critical year, with the R2 launch needing to demonstrate not just scale, but improving competitiveness in autonomy.
Suppliers face a more complicated picture. China stands out as the biggest wildcard, as revised subsidy rules disproportionately impact lower-priced vehicles and are expected to drive a year-over-year decline in passenger vehicle wholesales. While many global suppliers skew toward higher-end vehicles, which may help mix, Deutsche Bank still expects a net negative volume impact. BorgWarner is singled out as particularly exposed given its historical reliance on China for growth.
Another emerging risk is memory chips. The surge in AI data center demand has pulled wafer capacity away from automotive-grade DRAM, sending prices sharply higher. Deutsche Bank has not yet fully baked a DRAM-driven production hit into its forecasts, but flags it as a meaningful downside risk, especially for suppliers without strong inventory buffers or pricing protections. Some companies, like Aptiv, appear better insulated, while others may feel indirect pressure if vehicle production slows.
Stepping back, Deutsche Bank’s overarching message is that 2026 is shaping up to be less about selling more cars and more about selling the right ones, at the right margins, with tighter cost control. Automakers, particularly in the U.S., appear better positioned to navigate that environment than suppliers. ICE vehicles are once again doing the heavy lifting for profits, EV strategies are being reset to prioritize economics over ambition, and autonomy remains the long-term prize—but one that still requires proof.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/deutsche-bank-2026-looks-better-us-automakers-suppliers
January 20, 2026
Lumber Prices Rising
January 12, 2026
Mattress Imports
January 7, 2026
AI Use in Logistics
How is C.H. Robinson using AI? Its CFO has a story to tell
Lee talks about what 2 of its 30 agentic tools are doing at the 3PL that has Wall Street abuzz
· Tuesday, January 06, 2026
Key Takeaways:
There are two numbers that might help define the impact of AI at 3PL giant C.H. Robinson.
One of them is 55.3%. That’s the growth in the company’s stock price during 2025. There are no other logistics companies that had a record like that in the recently-completed year. Every analyst would say AI is a key part of that surge.
The second is 30. That’s the number of actual agentic AI tools in use at C.H. Robinson.
Damon Lee, the company’s CFO, reviewed C.H. Robinson’s use of AI in a recent interview with FreightWaves. Lee’s comments moved away from the general message on AI usage that C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) has been touting–with profitability and operational figures to back it up–to more specific details on what the company is using AI to get done.
It’s impossible to know if 30 is a large number or a small one. There is no measuring stick for how many agentic AI tools a freight brokerage that will produce 2025 revenue somewhere close to $11 billion should have at this stage in the AI revolution.
But the verdict from investors seems to be that 30 is a good number, they like the results and are hoping for more in 2026.
Lots of companies read invoices
At the annual meeting of the Transportation Intermediaries Association in April, a parade of companies touted their freight tech applications at a day-long session with journalists. Most of them talked about AI, but the message at one point became sort of repetitive: we use AI to read invoices or take an incoming call and convert it to language-based data that a broker could use.
The reality is that many companies across the spectrum of industries–not just logistics–that have plunged into AI aren’t seeing benefits, at least not yet.
That isn’t surprising to Lee. “I believe people using an off-the-shelf solution for AI, in many cases, will be nothing but a cost adder for their business,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll ever see positive productivity to offset the cost that they’re incurring, because the pay-by-the drink model of AI is very expensive.”
450 men and women at work
That’s why C.H. Robinson has a team of 450 engineers writing their own AI applications. They are the source of the 30 agentic AI tools cited by Lee.
“We’re using bespoke customized AI solutions to drive demonstrable business results,” Lee said.
Lee spoke about one of the 30 agentic AI solutions in going from the theoretical to the specific.
C.H. Robinson receives requests for about 600,000 rate quotes each year at its North American Surface Transport (NAST), the division that includes its core over the road brokerage activities.
Historically, it had the ability to respond to about 60% to 65% of those quotes, Lee said.
“So when a person was manually doing that exercise, somewhere around a third of those requests either never got answers, or they got answered in a timeline that didn’t meet the customer expectations,” Lee said.
With an agentic AI tool now at the center of the process for responding to those requests, Lee said C.H. Robinson is able to respond to 100% of the queries.
“I’m now getting to a third of the universe of freight that was available to me before that I never got to,” Lee said. “The sophistication in how I’m responding to the customer has gone up exponentially.”
A human might have five to 10 data points to use in responding to a quote. But the agentic AI tool, Lee said, has “tens of thousand if not hundreds of thousands of data points available to them.”
The price quote from the human would be “unsophisticated,” Lee said. Response time was 17 to 20 minutes.
But Lee said the agentic AI tool will respond in 32 seconds.
Optimizing margin rapidly
Asked to describe “favorite AI agent number two,” Lee turned to a tool he said is designed to optimize revenue management.
Pricing strategy at C.H. Robinson, Lee said, would be “fairly unsophisticated. It was targeted to figure out ‘I want to try to get this much margin, or this much volume, at this much margin.’”
If the gross margin rate in that strategy is 40%, loads are accepted or rejected on that basis, Lee said. “At the end of the month or the quarter, I see how my pricing strategy did,” he said.
What he described as “course correction” in the middle of that strategy wasn’t easy, according to Lee.
With the strategy now being powered by an in-house developed agentic AI tool, “we’ll set a pricing strategy at 8 a.m. on Monday, and by 8:05, we’re testing that strategy,” Lee said. The tool asks the question, “is the strategy yielding the volume and the margin that I expected to get?”
And if the answer is no, Lee said, “it will change the strategy two minutes later.” That replaces a system, Lee said, where “you might have a 30-day increment with no adjustments, or even a 90-day increment with no adjustments.” In its place, Lee said, is an approach where “the strategy gets adjusted hundreds of times a day.”
Lee referred to that model as “gross margin arbitrage.” Previously, Lee said, playing that strategy was largely impossible.
“Folks would say gross margin is commoditized,” Lee said, defining gross margin as a formula of revenue per load minus the cost of capacity. “But we’re able to optimize price, and we’re able to optimize cost because of the frequency in which we’re able to test the market and react to the market in terms of price,” he said.
If the data coming from the agentic AI tool is showing “volume coming in hot, I can choose to optimize margin,” Lee said. But if “there’s not as many loads on the market, I can get more aggressive in price.”
That’s what every broker does. But C.H. Robinson’s message is they can do it far more rapidly because of AI.
C.H. Robinson does not disclose gross margin in its earnings. It’s a derivative of adjusted gross profits, which are published with the company’s earnings.
The most recent earnings report shows that in the three months ended September 30, C.H. Robinson’s adjusted gross profit in its truckload brokerage was down 2% year-on-year. That is a relatively small drop considering the freight market in 2025 compared to the already weak one in 2024.
But the 3PL’s adjusted gross profits in its LTL operations were up 10.5%. For the nine months, the figures were down 0.9% in truckload and up 6.7% in LTL
Not everybody is buying the C.H. Robinson story. For example, data on Yahoo Finance shows a 6.47% share of the company’s stock float was sold short as of December 15. That is a relatively high number.
The question is whether C.H. Robinson’s price has surged because it’s a brokerage play–hard to imagine that, given the performance of other 3PLs like RXO (NYSE: RXO) and Landstar (NASDAQ: LSTR)–or an AI play. Lee wouldn’t say it wasn’t because of brokerage, but he said “we’ve had a few investors tell us we may be the only company that is getting the level of benefits from AI that we’ve enjoyed in this ecosystem.”
Within the AI play, Lee said there are chip makers and data centers and other companies whose stocks are more of a pure AI play.
What are harder to find are the operating beneficiaries, Lee said, “examples of folks that are winning at the application layer. And that’s certainly where C.H. Robinson is winning.”
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