Phil Smith

speaker

50 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 18 Jul

Phil Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Decisive Podcast: Insights and analysis to empower confident decision-making. · PMI in Focus: High Frequency Signals for an Uncertain Business Environment · 18 Jul 2026 podcast

Hi, Paul.

Yeah, thanks for having me back on.

But I'd begin by looking at some of the latest trends in stockpiling that you mentioned at the onset.

But the global level in June we saw manufacturers raise their purchasing activity solidly again, at the rate of growth slowing only slightly really from May's recent high.

But of course, what we're really interested in with stockpiling is how much of that buying activity actually reflects deliberate stockpiling efforts.

We can get a view from on that by looking at our panel comment tracker data.

So reports of companies raising their buying activity to deliberately increase their safety stocks.

We've seen those numbers actually fall in the last couple of months from April's peak.

They're still running at around twice the long-run average, so we're still seeing quite a degree of stockpiling, but not to the level we were seeing a couple of months before that.

And as for stock levels themselves, stocks of purchases, those two have continued to increase.

But again, the rate of growth has eased back from May's 45 month high.

And obviously, with the delays that we've seen a result of the conflict, things are taking longer to be delivered.

So we expect some lead times on those purchases.

But what we're interested to see in the coming months is at what point that sort of stockpiling efforts can

Go from being a driver of growth to potentially being a drag where sort of the front loading of an activity means there's some payback in the months to come.

So we'll keep out we'll keep an eye out for that in the PMI data.

And as for uncertainty, we're seeing a similar trend really.

So mentions of uncertainty some from our manufacturing and services panelists, those mentions have actually come down in the last couple of months.

Still running.

relatively elevated, so roughly three times the longer on average in June, but have certainly come down.

Showing 1–20 of 50 · page 1 of 3