Supply Trace’s Forced Labor Solution: The Free Tool Empowering Businesses in Global Trade

Machine Automated Transcript: All right, brilliant. So what you’re looking at right now. Andy Renee, I’d love to get your thoughts on this too, because we just launched. This is brand new. Stuff is supply trace.org, so you come to the website, it’s just like any search engine you’ve ever used. You can search for right now, any apparel company right now we have over one and a half million of them. That’s not just apparel brands, that’s also their factories. So you can search for any of them. You can see their relationships, which is over 2 million of them, and even their transactions, those bills of waiting, kind of already analyzed for you, over 3 million of those. And so I’m just gonna quickly show you, and this is gonna take just a couple minutes. What

does that compare? Though? Like these transactions and relationships to say, our paid supply chain tracing programs, I won’t mention any names, but are there are I know this is just apparel, but those numbers match what they have in for apparel. It’ll be the same.

So they’re using the same data on maritime shipments, and we actually have been giving them our risk data for a couple years now, so they have a lot of our data because we’ve given it to them for free, so that they can have access to the same thing.

All right? And so you, as you’re looking at this, this is your right now, you’re only using maritime data. You’re not using like rail or air cargo, or anything like that.

That’s correct, because air cargo, as you know right now, it’s in Congress whether or not they’ll make it publicly available, that’s something that’s a question. There’s some ways of getting it, if you purchase it through certain ways of working with three pls. But that’s not something that we do, we we’re looking at data that’s publicly available. And so with this being said, and by the way, the system can handle any data. So as soon as we get air data, then it could automatically go in here and they would map it automatically. So you can come in here and trace any apparel company if you click on any of these, these are some of the factories we’ve been investigating recently. Again, we’re not tech

people, we’re researchers, and so we’ve been researching these factories because they all have forced labor risks. So you can check those out. You can also scroll down and just see a map of red dots that we’ve been recently investigating. There are, in actuality, on the back end of our system, 10s of 1000s of red dots.

That’s interesting, because here, here’s the thing. This is on the eastern seaboard of China, and the Uyghur forced labor is in the northwest quadrant. That’s right. So that’s, you know, that’s, that’s phenomenal, right there. These

are companies, as you said, on the east coast, that are using Uyghur cotton that are using Uyghur forced labor transfers. And even though they’re on the East Coast, they’re still going to get stopped by CBP if they have that risk associated with them. And so yeah, they’re right there for people to see. And these are just a handful that people can check out. Again. There’s 1000s that they can find the red dots for. And so if I click on any of these, and I’m just going to keep it short and run a trace, then you can see for this specific factory, you can see their name, address, their Chinese address. You can see that the system traced almost 20,000 shipments from this factory to the United States over the last 10 years. They have a lot of addresses that this factory goes by. We work on cataloging all of them for you. And then here’s the evidence that we know that there’s risk, even as recently as right around the time actually the aflpa was being enforced. And so those are public documents that we then link so that people, as academics, we believe in showing our references and citations and so you can actually open up any of these documentation for this supplier and say, Oh, actually, yeah, they, they have shown that they are connected to this risk.

Now let me ask you, where would you say this is this company has investment and other equity instruments in Xinjiang. So they, they are investing in the region that you know, where we’re mostly invited to. But how do you get that? Because China has that anti espionage

new law. Yeah, absolutely. So we get that through corporate records. We do that through public available documents. We look at registries of companies, and we’re able to access that data and keep it on our back end. Keep in mind, the Great Firewall of China tries to block a lot of this stuff, but you can get it. Yeah, and all of these links are sometimes from Chinese websites that the government might take down in China, and so these are all archived versions, so if you click on them, they’re saved so that they can’t disappear off the internet.

Oh my gosh, that’s cool. Sean, thank you for explaining that

there’s the number of transactions. What’s interesting, if you go back up? Yeah, there is that obviously a very heavily. Into, you know, alright, 2015 1617, it’s a peak, and it starts dropping in. 2018 and then 2019 and then, here’s the thing, apparently, the way things are going is that people are moving away from this factory, this group, because the number of transaction is dropping. So

here’s the interesting part, and this is where we get really into the fun stuff on trade, trans shipments. This company might not be shipping directly to the US. It might be going through a third party country and then arriving, right? And you know, the three and a half billion dollars of goods that CBP has detained since the flpa, most of it’s from Malaysia. Even after the flpa was passed, 500 plus shipments into the US at the beginning of this year, they’re still shipping into the US, even though they are connected to Uyghur forced labor abuses. I’m going to scroll down just so you can see you got your top customers. All this is done for you. These are the types of goods that they’re shipping into the US right now. But let me show you the fun stuff, which is, let’s look at their customers, and I’m just going to look at the last two years. I could go back to 2014 but I’m just going to show you the last two years, because that’s when the uflpa was being enforced, starting summer of 2022 let me show you a map, because people like maps. It helps us to understand how the world works, maps and colors. Maps and colors. This is a map of the United States and all of the entities that are buying from this specific facility. So these are potentially all competitors, but they also could be collaborators. And the really interesting part is yellow dots are tier two or tier three connections. So that means that they’re not coming orange dots or tier one, that means they’re cut they’re buying directly from this factory. Yellow dots are tier two, so they’re buying from somewhere else first, which could be another country. I like to see it as flows sometimes. So this is the same factory shifting into a third party country and then eventually making its way into the United States or into transshipment through the US to Canada.

So that is such a cool graph. Wow. I love that graph. What do you call this one. Sean, this

is a SAM key. Very cool.

Yeah, it’s a simulation as far as in with the flow, right?

Yeah, exactly. It shows you the flow, the trade flow, in a really simple way. And some, some people are data nerds. You can come in here and just grab a data table. And let’s say you got really curious about one of these facilities. You can click on any of them, and you can open up their supply chain and understand where they buy stuff from. Just for fun. Andy and Ray shout out an apparel factory or company that you would want to see what their supply chain looks like.

Try LLB. All right,

let’s see what ll beans got going on. We got a few ll beans. So you can see we have some shipment data for Japan, for other places that they might be importing from a subsidiary. I’m going to run an advanced trace on LL Bean so it looks like they got addresses. Let’s click on this main company and see what we got here. So not a lot of shipments into main but you can see where it comes from and the types of products that they bought to their main factory. I’m going to see what other things we

got on here. This is their other location. So this is five more shipments. You can see for any company they ship to different addresses, and you can see all those addresses that they might import to Renee. Do you want to try out one?

Yeah, I want to try what’s my favorite gene? Oh, Lucky Brand.

I was going to say, Try Levi, but Lucky Brand, that’s, that’s good, yeah, we

got a bunch of, oh, we can do Levi. Oh, we could do Levi. I’m still so lucky.

Brand has many, many addresses it looks like. And so we’re just gonna click on the we’re gonna click on the first one. So look at this. So Lucky Brand. We’re facing 4000 shipments into the US from 130 suppliers internationally. Here’s all the addresses that this subsidiary shipped to. And if I go to their supplier page, I can see lucky brands based here. It looks like we’re just off of Manhattan in New Jersey. If I open up their supply chain, you can see their entire supply chain everywhere that Lucky Brand, wow that you chose, and

they’ve added pretty well as far as their sourcing accordingly,

they do look pretty clean for

the location,

Renee, you might have to check out the other ones as well. But, yeah, there’s a yellow.on here. So let’s, let’s check this

out. All about this personally, you you can make choices in your purchasing. You know, consumers. I mean, it’s important for us to make informed choices. Dollars, right? Absolutely.

People vote with their wallets. And so where they buy from influences, you know where the money goes, but even you know, any company might have risk. And so you can see, this isn’t a red dot, this is an orange dot, which means there’s potential risk. And so maybe Lucky Brand should check it out and see what’s going on over there, because there might be something that they need to be aware of

Yeah, that’s so cool. Thank you for showing us.

Yeah, that’s so cool. Thank you for showing us.

No for sure. I’m glad that you got a chance to see it. I invite you know as many people as possible to check it out and take it take advantage of the open access that we’re providing.

I will say that that is absolutely phenomenal. And, you know, this is well worth checking out. And I will say, not only as far as incorporating this, but this. You know, your your demo here, Sean has helped, from a standpoint of the C suite, the looking at it strategically, I could see all kinds of aspects, not only from a financial perspective and legal and all that, but even from a marketing perspective and operations and things of that nature. Where is it coming from, and what, what are we doing with dealing with this information? So great demo.

I like that, that response. It’s the wow factor, but it’s also thanks for being a part of the demo, thanks for throwing out a couple names. And if I could just say we’re maybe showing 5% of our data right now, because we’re just focused on apparel coming from China. As soon as we open up to other countries and other industries, you’re going to see the entire supply chain maps start to fill up. And that’s why it’s worth coming back every month and seeing well, maybe my favorite company has changed. Maybe the company I work in procurement or customs for has shifted. Maybe my clients have now a risk that wasn’t there before, and it’s updated constantly. So that’s the fun part. Is this is just the beginning. You.