Despite a prolonged period of soft demand, mergers and acquisition activity remains robust. More than 30 deals involving more than 30 different distributors were announced in July, more than a month earlier and well above the 14 reported in July 2023. So far in 2024, there have been 200 deals, far outpacing last year through seven months.

Specialty building materials distributor U.S. LBM is acquiring L.D. Mullins Lumber Company, a South Florida-based building products distributor. Mullins Lumber, which has been in operation since 1946, will now function under U.S. LBM's Raymond Building Supply, with Scott and Lev Mullins continuing to manage operations. The deal expands U.S. LBM's presence to 18 locations in Florida, aligning with the company's strategy to support South Florida's growing construction market.

Ferguson, a leading distributor in the construction market, has finalized its corporate reorganization and officially moved its headquarters to Newport News, VA, from the UK. "We have now completed the final step in our journey to better align our North American operations and leadership with our headquarters and governance," CEO Kevin Murphy said.

Multi-enterprise collaboration platforms are much more effective than email, spreadsheets and other forms of manually managing data to synchronize the supply chain for fast-moving consumer goods and pharmaceutical products, writes Jason Tham of Nulogy. These platforms can improve materials visibility, facilitate order collaboration, grow network capacity and simplify collaborative analytics through real-time data, Tham writes.

Multimodal large language models that use language and vision to comprehend complex scenarios are seen by some researchers as a way to add common sense to autonomous vehicles, writes Alice Plebe, a research fellow at University of College, London. This would improve on the current sense-think-act approach, Plebe notes.

Relationship selling will always be in fashion, writes sales expert Colleen Francis, but it should go beyond superficial relationships and coffee dates. Francis recommends that salespeople should be willing to make their customers uncomfortable by "teaching them something new that maybe they didn't know, or pushing them to think differently about a challenge that they might be facing."

The US economy added 114,000 jobs in July, falling below expectations as the labor market continues to cool. Economists had forecast a gain of 175,000 nonfarm payrolls added. The unemployment rate also rose to 4.3%, above expectations of an unchanged 4.1%.

A global equity sell-off worsened today, driven by disappointing economic data in the US. Nasdaq 100 futures fell over 4%, while S&P 500 contracts slipped 3%. Japan's Topix and Nikkei 225 indexes fell over 12% after the Bank of Japan raised interest rates Wednesday and indicated it was prepared to continue doing so. Taiwan's benchmark index had its worst day since 1967. Marcella Chow, global market strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management, expects US markets to focus on Federal Reserve policy, affecting the dollar-yen exchange rate and stocks.

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