[#275] Supply Chain in Numbers - March 3, 2025
ILA ratifies 62% pay raise, Lilly plans $27B investment for 4 new plants, Desteia raises $8M, Apptronik gets $350M for humanoids, Tale of heists to steal $2M Nike sneakers
Welcome to “Supply Chain in Numbers.” This newsletter tracks significant numbers from the supply chain world. Five prominent numbers are published every Monday. If you have any feedback, please send it to me.
62% pay raise over 6 years
Dockworkers voted in favor of a new labor deal that delivers a 62% pay raise and the promise of labor peace at ports from Maine to Texas for the next six years. The International Longshoremen’s Association vote caps one of the most contentious labor negotiations in decades at East Coast and Gulf Coast ports. Tens of thousands of dockworkers walked off the job for three days in October in the ILA’s first coastwide strike in almost 50 years. The strike shut down some of the country’s busiest gateways at New York-New Jersey, Houston and Georgia’s Port of Savannah during the peak shipping season when U.S. retailers are pulling holiday goods. The October walkout ended after Biden-administration officials intervened and helped broker a tentative deal that raised the base hourly rate for ILA port workers to $63 from $39 over six years. [WSJ]
$27 billion for 4 new manufacturing plants
Drugmaker Eli Lilly plans to build four new manufacturing plants in the U.S., a $27 billion investment that the company expects will create 3,000 high-skilled jobs and employ 10,000 construction workers. Three new sites would produce active pharmaceutical ingredients for its drugs, and the fourth would produce sterile injectable medicines such as diabetes drug Mounjaro. The company hasn’t picked the locations yet. It expects the plants to be making medicines within five years. [WSJ]
$8 million seed funding
Desteia Raises $8M in Seed Funding. Desteia extracts and organizes unstructured data from emails, messages, and documents to provide real-time visibility and decision-making tools for supply chain operators, focusing on US-Mexico trade. The funding will expand its AI-driven platform and strengthen operations across North America. [PR Newswire]
$350 million funding for humanoids
Apptronik, a Texas-based developer of humanoid robots, announced that it’s raised $350 million in Series A funding. Apptronik was founded in 2016, after the founding team had worked with NASA on the DARPA Robotics Challenge. It was bootstrapped for the next five years, before raising around $65 million in seed funding. Last year it signed a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind. The company plans to spend most of 2025 proving commercial viability via a series of pilot programs. [Axios]
$2 million Nike sneakers stolen
The thieves stealthily board eastbound freight trains, hiding until they reach lonely stretches of the Mojave Desert or high plains far from towns. They slash an air brake hose, causing the mile-long line of railcars to screech to an emergency stop. Then, they go shopping. That’s the modus operandi described by investigators in a string of at least 10 heists targeting BNSF trains in California and Arizona since last March. According to investigators, all but one resulted in the theft of Nike sneakers, their combined value approaching $2 million. [LA Times]