Monday, September 21, 2026
UBTECH opened a plant in Liuzhou on 12 September that it says will produce more than 10,000 humanoid robots a year, one every ten minutes. Some of the assembly is done by the company's own Walker S units. The interesting number is not the robots. It is the throughput.
US officials have linked satellite imagery supplied to Iran by Chinese entities to the July strike on a base in Jordan that killed three American soldiers, The Wall Street Journal reported. Iran obtained high-resolution pictures of the base before the attack and after it. The officials did not accuse the Chinese government. The disclosure lands ten days before Xi Jinping is due at the White House.
Eurometal says 300,000 European manufacturing jobs will go before the end of this year, and marked the claim by carrying ten coffins around the European Commission. The stunt makes the figure easy to discount. The cost gap underneath it does not depend on the stunt being fair.
Porsche's operating margin went from 14.5 percent to 0.3 in a year. Volkswagen Group deliveries in China fell 37 percent in a quarter, in a market down 20 percent overall. Some investors have concluded the group is not fixable, and the interesting question is what fixing it would require.
US officials say COSCO vessels carry concealed signals-intelligence equipment. China calls the claim baseless. Either way, the problem the accusation creates is commercial: the fleet in question calls at the ports that everyone else's cargo moves through.
China's factory gauge says contraction. Its high-tech sub-index says expansion. A single national figure is now averaging two manufacturing economies that are moving in opposite directions.