What moved this month
Five items a month, two lines each: what happened, and what it means for you, the buyer. The underlying data is free and official, published somewhere. Turning it into "put the duty-variation risk on the supplier in this contract" is the part nobody publishes.
To track this yourself you would need customs filings, company accounts, standards publications, court calendars and equipment-authorisation registers — in parallel, every month. We read all of it, and hand you half a page.
Latest · September 2026 (inaugural issue)
One page, five signals. Titles and judgements below; the full figures and citations are in the brief itself.
| Category | What happened | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier capital | Hai Robotics filed for a Hong Kong listing for the second time on 13 September, disclosing revenue, margin and accumulated losses | A supplier is converting capital into scale. Expect softer pricing over the next two quarters — and more delivery slippage while it scales. Fix delivery and service terms before you fix price |
| Equipment authorisation | On 28 July 2026 the FCC added foreign-produced advanced robotic devices to its Covered List. New foreign-produced models can no longer obtain equipment authorisation; AGVs may be caught even on fixed paths, and dual-use pool-cleaning robots are not excluded | The set of models you can legally import narrows from here. Check the FCC ID before you commit, and price the fact that even authorised models sit on a time-limited software-update waiver |
| Tariff procedure | The new Section 301 investigation has cleared its hearing with a decision due around March 2027; separately, the US trade court hears argument on Section 301's legality on 30 September | Your landed cost still has an unpriced upward leg. Ask for a split quote — goods versus duty — buy FOB where you can, and put duty-variation risk on the supplier |
| Buyer structure | US warehousing employment has fallen to about 1.83 million while the number of warehousing establishments grew roughly 40% over a decade | Sites are getting smaller and more numerous. Weight expandability and relocatability over peak throughput — a fixed single-site installation is the wrong shape for this trend |
| Compliance floor | Part 3 of robot safety standard R15.08 (duties of the user) was published in April 2026, and tenders are now citing it clause by clause | Part 3 places those duties on you, the user: training records, commissioning sign-off, maintenance logs. Put them in the contract as deliverable evidence, or you carry the liability |
Sources and evidence grades for all five items are in the brief; where a record is not visible to us, we say so rather than infer it. Next issue: early October.
Every item above is also a signal to the supplier across the table, and the two readings often point opposite ways. A manufacturer reading the tariff item reaches the opposite conclusion: don't quote a fixed long-horizon price, and put a reopening clause in the contract. Our Chinese-language pages publish that side of the reading. We set out the method on both sides, so you can see whose interest a judgement serves.
How to get it
Currently sent by email, one a month, at no charge. Write to [email protected] to subscribe — and tell us which category you care about most, and we will cover it first.
US import manifests contain a lawful blind spot. Importers can request confidentiality, which removes the record from every commercial database. Goods imported through a separate legal entity, sourced domestically, or arriving by air or overland from Mexico and Canada never enter the dataset either. So there are months when we cannot conclude that a company did not import something. That is the edge of the data, not an oversight — and stating it beats having you discover the omission yourself.