Raphael Stevens

Walmart is opening five automated distribution centers for fresh food across the country.
The facilities are part of a broader effort by the big-box retailer to modernize its supply chain and expand capacity to keep up with customers’ online orders.
Automation is also a reason why CEO Doug McMillon said the company expects to grow profits faster than sales in the coming years.

Automated distribution centers for Walmart grocery business.
Courtesy: Walmart

Walmart said Wednesday that it will open five automated distribution centers for fresh food across the country, as the retailer chases efficiency and its online grocery business grows.
The discounter’s new facilities are roughly 700,000 square feet on average. Chilled and frozen areas have automation that stores and retrieves perishable items, such as strawberries and frozen chicken nuggets that are later sold at stores or added to customers’ e-commerce orders.

Walmart is the nation’s largest grocer, but it is modernizing its supply chain to keep up with customers who are increasingly picking up orders in the parking lot or getting groceries delivered to their doors. Store pickup and delivery drove the company’s 22% e-commerce gains in the U.S. in its most recent quarter.
The retailer has been automating supply chain facilities across the country, including distribution centers that handle shelf-stable items and fulfillment centers that help pack and ship online orders. Automation, along with higher-margin businesses like advertising, is a key reason why CEO Doug McMillon said in April 2023 that Walmart would grow its profits faster than sales over the next five years.
In an interview with CNBC, Dave Guggina, executive vice president of Walmart’s supply chain, said the automated facilities give the company a more precise picture of its inventory and allow it to get groceries to stores faster.
“We know what we own, in what quantity and where it is, all in near real time,” he said. “And we know that at a level of proficiency that is significantly improved than what we’ve been able to achieve with manual processes or legacy software.”
That allows Walmart to operate more cost-effectively by better predicting demand and reducing money spent on “safety stock,” extra product kept in a warehouse or back of the store to avoid running out completely, he said.

The high-tech facilities also allow more density. Each distribution center has twice the storage capacity and can process more than two times the volume of a traditional site, Guggina said.
Automation is contributing to higher spending at Walmart. The company has said its capital expenditures for the year will be 3% to 3.5% of net sales, which would translate to roughly $22 billion based on the midpoint of its guidance. The total, which includes its expansion of automation and hundreds of store remodels, is higher than the $12 billion that Walmart has historically spent on capital expenditures annually in recent years.
Walmart has said that by early 2026, about two-thirds of its stores will be serviced by some kind of automation and roughly 55% of fulfillment center volume will move through automated facilities. Unit cost averages could improve by about 20% by that time, the retailer has said.

What an automated facility looks like

Inside of the facilities, the automated storage and retrieval system can quickly grab the items that a store needs to restock its shelves and ferry them to an area where they’re put together into a dense pallet that’s ready to deliver to stores. Instead of relying on a worker to manually stack those items into a cube like a real-life Jenga puzzle, a robotic system helps push and stack them to put fragile items like eggs and peaches at the top.
Guggina said the automation can build customized pallets for a store that include only the specific items needed to fulfill online grocery orders. Those refrigerated or frozen products could be kept in the back of the store and used exclusively to fill those orders.

Automated distribution centers for Walmart grocery business.
Courtesy: Walmart

Guggina declined to say how much each facility costs to build and how that compares with traditional distribution centers for perishable items.
Walmart has already built and tested the first of the five automated distribution centers for fresh food in Shafter, California. It recently opened the second one in Lancaster, Texas, which is near Dallas. It plans to open the three others in Wellford, South Carolina; Belvidere, Illinois; and Pilesgrove, New Jersey.
Along with the new builds, Walmart is expanding four of its traditional distribution centers for fresh food to include automation. It will add about a half a million square feet to each of the facilities in Mankato, Minnesota; Mebane, North Carolina; Garrett, Indiana; and Shelbyville, Tennessee. It’s also retrofitting a legacy facility in Winter Haven, Florida.
The automation will bring changes for workers — and could reduce jobs at some facilities. Guggina said Walmart, which is the nation’s largest private employer with roughly 1.6 million workers, expects to have as many overall employees as it has now, or more, in the coming years.
But he added Walmart expects to increase productivity without hiring at the same pace as in the past. The roles it needs will change, too, he said. For example, it may need fewer people on the warehouse floor and more people to drive trucks in its fleet.
That will also be the case at the automated distribution centers for groceries, he said. Workers in the company’s traditional facilities act as “industrial athletes,” lifting hundreds of cases per hour and walking many miles each day. At the new facilities, he said, they play the part of supervisor.

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Inventory of both new and existing homes is finally rising.
But the supply of newly built homes appears to be way too high.
Home prices, which usually cool off when supply is high, continue to rise.

Anyone out shopping for a home today knows there is still precious little for sale.
The housing market is just beginning to come out of its leanest few years in history. Inventory of both new and existing homes is finally rising, but there is something suddenly strange in the numbers: The supply of newly built homes appears to be way too high.

The numbers, however, are deceiving due to the unprecedented dynamics of today’s housing market, which can be traced back two decades to another unprecedented time in housing, the subprime mortgage boom.
All of it is precisely why home prices, which usually cool off when supply is high, just continue to rise.

The supply scenario

There is currently a 4.4-month supply of both new and existing homes for sale, according to the National Association of Home Builders, or NAHB. Months’ supply is a common calculation used in the market to measure how long it would take to sell all the homes available at the current sales pace. A six-month supply is considered a balanced market between a buyer and a seller.
Supply was already low at the start of this decade, but pandemic-driven demand pushed it to a record low by the start of 2021 at just two-months’ supply. That shortage of homes for sale, combined with strong demand, pushed home prices up more than 40% from pre-pandemic levels.
Now supply is finally beginning to climb back, but the gains are mostly in the new home market, not on the existing side. In fact, there is now a nine-month supply of newly built homes for sale, nearly three times that of existing homes. New and old home months’ supply usually track pretty closely. New construction now makes up 30% of total inventory, about twice its historical share, according to the NAHB.

Single-family homes in a residential neighborhood in San Marcos, Texas.
Jordan Vonderhaar | Bloomberg | Getty Images

“June 2022 recorded the largest ever lead of new home months’ supply (9.9) over existing single-family home months’ supply (2.9),” wrote Robert Dietz, chief economist for the NAHB. “This separation makes it clear that an evaluation of current market inventory cannot simply examine either the existing or the new home inventory in isolation.”
This unusual dynamic has been driven by both recent swings in mortgage rates and an unprecedented disaster in the housing market that began 20 years ago.

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The foundation of today’s tricky numbers

This housing market is unlike any other because of economic forces unlike any other. First, in 2005, there was a massive runup in home sales, homebuilding and home prices fueled by a surge in subprime mortgage lending and a frenzy of trading in new financial products backed by these mortgages.
That all came crashing down quickly, resulting in one of the worst foreclosure crises since the Great Depression and causing the ensuing Great Recession. Single-family housing starts plummeted from a high of 1.7 million units in 2005 to just 430,000 in 2011. By 2012, new homes made up just 6% of the total for-sale supply and, even by 2020, housing starts had yet to recover to their historical average of about 1.1 million units. They sat at 990,000.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic and during that time, consumer demand surged and mortgage rates set more than a dozen record lows, so builders responded. Housing starts shot up to 1.1 million in 2021. The Federal Reserve was bailing out the economy, making homebuying much cheaper, and the new work-from-home culture had Americans moving like never before. Suddenly, supply was sucked into a tornado of demand.

Mortgage rate mayhem

The current strange divide in supply between newly built and existing homes is also due to roller-coaster mortgage rates, dropping to historic lows at the start of the pandemic and then spiking to 20-year highs just two years later. Millions of borrowers refinanced at the lows and now have no desire to move because they would have to trade a 3% or 4% rate on their loans to the current rate, which is around 7%. This lock-in effect caused new listings to dry up.
It also put builders in the driver’s seat. Homebuilders had already ramped up production in the first years of the pandemic, with single-family homes surging to more than 1.1 million in 2021, according to the U.S. census, before dropping back again when mortgage rates shot up. Builders have been able to buy down mortgage rates to keep sales higher, but as of this May, they are building at an annualized pace of 992,000.
Resale listings improved slightly this spring, as mortgage rates fell back slightly, and by June, active listings were 16.5% higher than they were the year before, according to Redfin. Some of that increased supply, however, was due to listings sitting on the market longer.
“The share of homes sitting on the market for at least one month has been increasing year over year since March, when growth in new listings accelerated, but demand from buyers remained tepid, as it has been since mortgage rates started rising in 2022,” according to a Redfin report.

A home available for sale is shown in Austin, Texas, on May 22, 2024.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images

Growth at the low end

On the resale market, the supply is lowest in the $100,000 to $500,000 price tier, according to the National Association of Realtors. That is where the bulk of today’s buyers are. Higher mortgage rates have them seeking cheaper homes.
Interestingly, however, while supply is increasing across all price tiers, it is increasing most in that same lower-end price tier, meaning it is simply not enough. As fast as the homes are coming on the market, they are going under contract.
For example, there is just a 2.7-month supply of homes for sale between $100,000 and $250,000, but supply is up 19% from a year ago. Meanwhile, there is a 4.2-month supply of homes priced upward of $1 million, but supply is up just 5% from a year ago.
This explains why home prices remain stubbornly high, even with improving supply. Prices in May, the latest reading, were 4.9% higher than May 2023, according to CoreLogic. The gains have begun to shrink slightly, but not everywhere.
“Persistently stronger home price gains this spring continue in markets where inventory is well below pre-pandemic levels, such as those in the Northeast,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist for CoreLogic.
“Also, markets that are relatively more affordable, such as those in the Midwest, have seen healthy price growth this spring.”
Hepp notes that Florida and Texas, which are seeing comparatively larger growth in the supply of homes for sale, are now seeing prices below where they were a year ago.
While analysts have expected prices to ease and mortgage rates to come down in the second half of this year, it remains to be seen if rates will actually come down and if the supply-demand imbalance will allow prices to cool. If mortgage rates do come down, demand will surely surge, putting even more pressure on supply and keeping prices elevated.
“Yes, inventory is rising and will continue to rise, particularly as the mortgage rate lock-in effect diminishes in the quarters ahead. But current inventory levels continue to support, on a national basis, new construction and some price growth,” Dietz added.

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The European-built Ariane 6 rocket launched for the first time on Tuesday from Kourou, French Guiana.
Ariane 6, standing more than 200 feet tall, is about a $4.5 billion program overseen by the European Space Agency and built by ArianeGroup, a joint venture of Airbus and Safran.
With the debut of Ariane 6, Europe rejoins a launch market that has been dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

This photograph shows the takeoff of the European Space Agency satellite launcher Ariane 6 rocket from its launch pad, at the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, on July 9, 2024.
Jody Amiet | AFP | Getty Images

The powerful European-built Ariane 6 rocket made its long-awaited liftoff on Tuesday as the region returned to a launch market dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Ariane 6, standing more than 200 feet tall and powered by its Vulcain engine and a pair of boosters, launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 3 p.m. ET and then reached orbit successfully.

The rocket is a combined effort of about $4.5 billion overseen by the European Space Agency, or ESA, and built by ArianeGroup, an Airbus and Safran joint venture. Thirteen nations contribute to the Ariane 6 program.

This photograph shows the takeoff of the European Space Agency satellite launcher Ariane 6 rocket from its launch pad, at the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, on July 9, 2024.
Jody Amiet | AFP | Getty Images

It is the latest in a European rocket lineage dating back to the 1970s, and succeeds the Ariane 5, which launched 117 times until it retired last year. Ariane 6 comes in two versions: Ariane 62, with two solid rocket boosters that can deliver as much as 10,000 kilograms of cargo to low Earth orbit (LEO), and Ariane 64, a model with four solid rockets boosters that can carry as many as 21,000 kilograms to LEO.
In the launch market, Ariane 6 falls in the “heavy” class of rockets.
Ariane 6’s debut flight is a demonstration mission for the ESA, and will haul a variety of small satellites and spacecraft. After liftoff, the flight will last nearly three hours before it completes the deployment of 11 spacecraft, and also includes a key series of tests of the rocket’s upper stage engine.

Delayed debut

The European Space Agency satellite launcher Ariane 6 rocket is seen prior to its maiden launch at the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, on July 9, 2024.
Jody Amiet | Afp | Getty Images

Ariane 6’s first voyage has been postponed by years, with delays fueled by technical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Following its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, Russia suspended all European mission launches on its Soyuz rockets. A smaller alternative European rocket, the Vega-C, has been grounded since a failed 2022 launch, and is not expected to fly again until later this year at the earliest.
Despite rising costs and long delays, European leaders continue to support the Ariane 6 program, stressing the importance of the continent having its own access to space, rather than relying on SpaceX.
But Europe has already had to turn to SpaceX several times out of necessity as the company enjoys a near monopoly on the global launch market.

The European Space Agency satellite launcher Ariane 6 rocket moves to the launch pad prior to its liftoff at the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana, on July 9, 2024.
Jody Amiet | Afp | Getty Images

SpaceX’s reusable and comparatively low-price Falcon 9 rockets offer a compelling alternative to spacecraft that have been waiting for Ariane 6 to begin flying. Already, high-profile ESA missions such as the EarthCARE spacecraft, Euclid telescope and Galileo satellites have launched on SpaceX rockets.
Last month, European weather satellite operator EUMETSAT made the “exceptional” decision to swap an upcoming planned satellite launch from Ariane 6 to Falcon 9, a choice that was met with derision from other European officials.
“I am impatiently waiting to understand what reasons could have led Eumetsat to such a decision,” Philippe Baptiste, leader of France’s space agency CNES, wrote in a post on social media.
“How far will we, Europeans, go in our naivety?” Baptiste added.
Notably, while most U.S. companies seeking to challenge SpaceX are leaning into reusable rocket technology, Ariane 6 is expendable similar to its predecessor — meaning each vehicle is a one-off that is discarded after the mission.
It is not just Europe’s desire for its own space access driving Ariane 6. The rocket has another crucial customer waiting for launches: Amazon. The American tech giant has ordered a staggering 97 rocket launches from five companies, nearly a fifth of which were won by Arianespace to fly Project Kuiper internet satellites on Ariane 6. More

Washington-based startup Gravitics signed a $125 million contract with Axiom Space to expand the latter’s planned space station.
Gravitics aims to become a manufacturer of private space stations, with designs for modules that have the “largest interior volume in a standalone spacecraft,” the company said.
“We’re a very hardware-rich company, so we’re building at the same time we’re finalizing design,” Gravitics CEO and founder Colin Doughan told CNBC.

A pathfinder for Gravitics’ 4-meter space station module design in use for developing manufacturing and assembly methods.

Washington-based startup Gravitics has signed a $125 million contract to expand Axiom Space’s planned space station, the latest deal in the burgeoning private market for orbiting habitats.
“Working with the station operator that will have hardware on orbit soonest is an exciting development,” Gravitics CEO and founder Colin Doughan told CNBC.

Axiom is one of several companies building private space stations as NASA plans for the International Space Station to end its time in orbit. Already, Axiom has modules of its space station being built by Italian aerospace contractor Thales Alenia. The Gravitics order adds another “pressurized spacecraft” that would attach to Axiom’s station after its planned launch in two years.
The agreement between Axiom and Gravitics, which was founded in 2021, represents the startup’s most significant yet. Gravitics previously raised a total of $20 million in venture funding as it looks to make its mark as a manufacturer of private space stations.

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The nearly 50-employee company, based in a northern suburb of Seattle, aims to provide space station modules — effectively the building blocks of the orbiting habitats — as a plug-and-play product line that can launch on a variety of rockets, whether those currently flying such as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or future behemoths such as Blue Origin’s New Glenn.
The space station modules Gravitics is designing range from 3 meters (9 feet) to 8 meters (26 feet) in diameter. The largest module, which the company boasts will have the “largest interior volume in a standalone spacecraft,” is dubbed StarMax, a name inspired by SpaceX’s towering Starship rocket.
“We started by looking at Starship and saying, ‘Someone is going to maximize that payload volume,'” Doughan said.

At present, NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations, or CLD, program has been doling out development contracts to companies building space stations in anticipation of the ISS’ intentional destruction at the end of the decade. Axiom was the first to win a NASA contract for building space station modules, and Gravitics would connect its spacecraft later this decade.
But Gravitics’ deal is not exclusive, Doughan said.
“We hope to be on multiple teams for the [second phase of CLD], not as the prime [bidder] because we have zero interest in operations … But I do anticipate that you’ll start seeing some of the architectures reflect some [of our space station modules] built into some of these designs moving forward,” Doughan said.
Gravitics has been working on prototypes as well as testing key parts, such as test-firing its propulsion system and pressure-testing module prototypes. Doughan said Gravitics is flying some of its components to the ISS later this year for testing and plans to have a subscale spacecraft launched by 2026.

A propulsion system test firing at Gravitics’ facility in Marysville, Washington.

“We’re a very hardware-rich company, so we’re building at the same time we’re finalizing design,” Doughan said.
The company signed an agreement with NASA on new approaches to testing large spacecraft, as well as an early Space Force development contract. The latter contract, Doughan emphasized, represents Gravitics working “with those customers that are ready to buy.”
“Space Force’s budget is already ballooning beyond NASA’s, and it won’t stop,” Doughan said.
The Axiom deal is a catalyst for Gravitics’ growth, Doughan said, as the company plans to double its head count in the coming months and kick off a new round of fundraising. More