Toyota set to build $1.3 billion battery plant in America
Automaker Toyota announced that it will be building a new battery plant in North Carolina it looks to expand its electrification efforts. The new site in Liberty will begin production in 2025 and to begin with, it will be able to supply lithium-ion batteries for 800,000 vehicles per year. According to Chief administrative officer for Toyota Motor North America Chris Reynolds, this expansion will “pave the way” for the company’s production of electric vehicles.
In October, Toyota announced that it would establish a new company and build a new U.S. battery plant with Toyota Tsusho, a unit of the Toyota Group. The investment for the new plant will be made by the new company, named Toyota Battery Manufacturing. The expansion of the Toyota brand with the new branch of the company is expected to create 1,750 jobs in the area.
The funds are part of the $13.5 billion Toyota announced in September to develop batteries and its battery supply system by 2030. In the United States alone, the company announced last month that it would invest $3.4 billion (380 billion yen) on U.S. automotive battery development and production through 2030.
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Driver shortages halt Amazon’s trucking ambitions
E-commerce giant Amazon is expected to move record numbers of packages this festive season, however trucker shortages are colliding with their strong ambitions. As part of its project titled Amazon Freight Partners (AFP), the company is pushing to recruit contractors to haul its goods across warehouses to meet consumer demand.
The project introduced by Amazon involves independent trucking companies moving goods between Amazon sites. The Amazon-exclusive contractors also move goods to and from the company’s fleet of 85 freight aircraft. Since 2019, Amazon has recruited 250 AFPs and allowed the companies “to start and scale their own transportation businesses and create job opportunities for thousands of drivers,” an Amazon spokeswoman has said.
Despite the scale of the company and its operations, Amazon is still feeling the effects of the driver shortages. It is estimated that the industry has a record shortfall of around 80,000 big-rig drivers. Ebony McKinley, owner of family-run Seven Strong Trucking which is a member of the AFP program says that “everybody’s feeling the heat” as “there’s a shortage of drivers, especially the good drivers.”
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Supply chain disruptions may finally ease in the second half of 2022
According to a report by trade credit insurer Euler Hermes, the global supply chain disruptions may continue until the second half of next year. Continued Coronavirus outbreaks and the measures that come with them can affect supply chain operations and according to analysts, the new variant, Omicron, could lead to further blows.
Shortfalls in production are behind 75% of the current contractions in global trade volume, and logistic bottlenecks are the cause of the remaining 25%, Euler Hermes economists wrote. The company also mentioned the renewed global virus outbreaks, China’s zero-Covid policy and expected trade volatility during the new year as being reasons for short-term disruptions.
In the report it said the current problems are likely to ease in the latter half of 2022. The first reason for this is that consumer demand has peaked, and over time, levels of demand will normalize. Secondly, inventories are heading back to pre-pandemic levels, as “the level of inventories is already above pre-crisis long-term averages,” it said. Lastly, increased shipping capacity is on the cards: “the rapidly growing new transportation capacity orders … should turn operational towards the end of 2022, which should ease shipping bottlenecks,” the insurer said.
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