#42 - Hormuz on a Knife's Edge, Amazon Bets on Robots, and China Challenges the Chip Market

Today: the US toll on the Strait of Hormuz, AI in Amazon's warehouses, and China challenging the chip market with the year's biggest IPO.

Three stories that look far apart but each trace, in their own way, where Procurement is headed.

The Strait of Hormuz becomes a toll road: what the global supply chain risks

On July 14, Trump announced via social media that the United States was self-declaring “Guardians of the Strait of Hormuz,” and that every ship transiting it would have to pay a 20% toll on cargo value as compensation for “securing the most volatile stretch of water in the world.”

The proposal set off alarm across the shipping chain. Hapag-Lloyd called the toll “fundamentally wrong,” pointing out that Suez or Panama Canal fees are justified by enormous infrastructure investment; nothing comparable exists in the Strait of Hormuz. For a Very Large Crude Carrier loaded with oil, the cost estimated by BIMCO (the Baltic and International Maritime Council, the reference international association that collects and processes global shipping cost data) exceeds $27 million per voyage, a bill that inevitably gets passed down the supply chain.

The backdrop is already fragile. The US-Iran ceasefire from mid-June cracked quickly: in the days around the announcement, only 14 ships were transiting daily, against 37 a week earlier. Under normal conditions, roughly 21 million barrels of oil pass through the Strait each day, a fifth of global flows.

For Procurement, this goes beyond the price of a barrel. Energy, raw material, and semi-finished goods contracts referencing spot prices tied to Gulf crude are now exposed to a new kind of structural volatility—no longer cyclical, but political and tariff-driven. Force majeure clauses, the ones that let you suspend contractual obligations when exceptional, unforeseeable events occur, are back at the center of renegotiations.

Iran's Foreign Minister Araghchi responded with irony, saying he agreed with the principle in theory but claiming Iran's own role as the Strait's “natural guardian.” In the background, Persian Gulf freight rates remain unstable, and the European Union has reiterated that international maritime law makes no provision for tolls in international waters.

🔗 Fonti: CNBC, The Guardian

Amazon: three AI moves reshaping logistics and Procurement

Amazon deserves a closer look in this edition on its own, because in the last thirty days it has moved three different pieces on the same board: warehouse automation, spend management, and sustainability. Looking at them together tells a bigger story.

At Delivering the Future in London, Amazon unveiled the next generation of its Proteus robot. The novelty isn't strength (it can already move 400 kg carts) but language: Proteus now processes natural-language commands, taking instructions from colleagues as if it were a human operator. Scott Dresser, VP of Amazon Robotics, put it this way: “You tell it what needs to be done, and it decides priority, route, and timing. It becomes your assistant for material handling.” The system is currently in pilot; European deployment is planned for the first half of 2027, part of a €10 billion-plus investment in European operations aimed at creating 25,000 new jobs on the continent.

At the Amazon Business Exchange 2026, Céline Vuillequez, VP of Amazon Business Europe, also presented Amazon Quick: an AI assistant available to Prime Business customers that connects to thousands of applications, automating repetitive tasks and producing full deliverables, from comparison reports to presentations. The context matters here: according to Amazon Business's latest State of Procurement Report, 73% of senior leaders consider data and analytics critical to improving operations over the next two years, but 47% of decision-makers struggle to manage operational efficiency with the resources they have. ams OSRAM, by integrating with SAP Ariba, cut purchase approval times from seven days to under one.

Finally, in its 2025 Sustainability Report, Amazon reports 100% renewable electricity coverage for the third year running, a 38% cut in carbon intensity since 2019, and 52,700 electric vans on the road (+68% year over year). AI is now installed in 820 facilities to detect leaks and mechanical failures, along with systems that identify materials in unsellable products to optimize recycling.

The bigger picture: Amazon is building an infrastructure where robotics, AI applied to purchasing, and sustainability are all part of the same system, seen from different angles.

With Compri: our AI agents read through contract history, flag spend anomalies, and compare supplier proposals, so the Procurement team gains capacity without adding headcount.

🔗 Fonti: Procurement Magazine(I,II)

CXMT: China enters the global memory chip market

Book-building began on July 15, 2026 for the year's biggest semiconductor IPO: ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's leading DRAM chipmaker, is aiming to raise 29.5 billion yuan (about $4.3 billion) on Shanghai's STAR market. Listing is set for July 27.

CXMT's numbers are hard to ignore: in Q1 2026, revenue grew 719% year over year, with net profit exceeding 33 billion yuan in a single quarter. Its average selling prices now sit within 5-10% of Samsung's and SK Hynix's, a gap that seemed unbridgeable just a year ago.

What changed? Memory demand for AI data centers is structurally outrunning supply. Against that backdrop, CXMT captured a 7.7% share of the global DRAM market in 2025, becoming the world's fourth-largest producer. Tencent signed a multi-year deal worth over 20 billion yuan for server DDR5 memory; Apple is reportedly negotiating with Washington for authorization to buy CXMT chips for its own devices, pushed by rising costs that have already hit iPad and MacBook prices.

The relevant point for Procurement isn't just financial. CXMT's listing signals China's accelerating self-sufficiency strategy in semiconductors. According to Reuters, this will be the largest A-share offering in the sector since SMIC's 2020 listing. The implicit message to global supply chains: the Samsung-SK Hynix-Micron trio's grip is about to loosen, at least for standard memory.

🔗 Fonti: Reuters (via MSN/The Edge Malaysia), South China Morning Post

PepsiCo: 70% of ingredients are now certified sustainable. Scope 3 is still waiting

PepsiCo has published the results of its Positive Agriculture program for 2025: 70% of key ingredients are now sustainably sourced, up from 66% the year before. The target for 2030 is 90%. The company relies on over 50 crops from 61 countries, which makes its agricultural supply chain one of the most complex assets to certify in the food & beverage sector.

PepsiCo's definition of a “sustainable ingredient” requires the raw material to clear a minimum threshold of 0.01% of annual sourcing volume and pass a structured risk assessment. It's not the strictest certification on the market, but it's verifiable and scalable.

The less-reported part of the story is the flip side of the report: PepsiCo has once again postponed publishing its Scope 3 metrics. Supply chain emissions—those generated by suppliers and upstream/downstream logistics—remain the blind spot of nearly every major ESG program in the sector. Supply Chain Dive flagged this delay as a sign that collecting credible data across supply chains spanning 61 countries is still beyond the operational reach of many companies, even well-resourced ones.

For Italian procurement managers, PepsiCo's trajectory is instructive for two reasons: gradual, measurable progress works better than an ambitious, undocumented promise, and Scope 3 remains the unsolved problem that the new CSRD directive will make increasingly hard to keep postponing.

🔗 Fonti: Supply Chain Dive, Supply Chain Digital

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