Business Strategy

Canada's share of merchandise exports going to the United States fell from 75.9% in 2024 to 71.7% last year, and Statistics Canada clocked July at 66.3%, the lowest reading since 1997 outside the pandemic. That is a remarkable shift in the customer mix, and it has not yet moved a single rail line. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Mark Carney is exploring whether Canada could hold some form of associate membership with the European Union. The status does not exist y

Chinese refiners have a supply problem this week. A pipeline from Alberta is already part of the answer. Reuters reports that Chinese independent refiners have bought more than 20 million barrels from Canada, West Africa and South America as supplies from Iran and Russia become harder to secure. Canadian heavy crude moving through Trans Mountain is part of that buying wave. Most of the case for diversifying Canada’s oil exports is about us: what happens if our largest custome

GE Aerospace has agreed to pay $11.75 billion for Consolidated Precision Products, a castings company most people outside aerospace have never heard of, and one GE has been buying from for more than 15 years. CPP makes highly engineered castings that go into jet engines, and castings have become a persistent constraint on engine output. GE says it wants more capacity, but it also wants design and manufacturing closer together so it can apply its own operating system to the pl

An oilfield-services company just agreed to spend US$3.4 billion on heat exchangers, and very little of it has to do with oil. SLB is buying Kelvion, a German thermal-management firm, and taking on roughly another US$700 million of debt. Kelvion's biggest and fastest-growing market is data centres. SLB expects the two companies' data-centre businesses to generate more than US$2 billion in pro forma revenue this year. Read that as a pivot into AI and you miss what actually hap

An automaker closes an assembly plant and four thousand people lose their jobs. The site sits behind a fence while governments work out what to do with an industrial complex built for somebody else's production system. Then another manufacturer shows up. That is Camaçari, in Bahia, where Ford stopped production in 2021. BYD bought the former Ford property from the state for roughly US$55 million, committed R$5.5 billion to the complex, and started building cars there in 2025.

Canada creates ideas, but needs the USA to fund them and China to scale them. Chinese Premier Li Qiang recently called for China to shore up external demand and deepen international trade, while also encouraging more private investment in infrastructure. At the same time, he acknowledged that weak domestic demand remains a serious problem. The latest numbers help explain the concern. Industrial output growth slowed to 4.5% in July, while retail sales grew just 0.6%. Fixed-ass