ARLINGTON, Va. – October 29, 2026 -- The Society of Chemical Manufacturers & Affiliates (SOCMA) is closing the fourth quarter of 2026 with 10 new members: five specialty chemical manufacturers and five affiliate companies.

Louisville – – October 29, 2026 -- Equip Exposition sold out its 1.3 million square feet of exhibit space for a fifth consecutive year and drew approximately 30,000 attendees to Louisville, Kentucky, on October 21-23. Registered attendance grew across key demographic categories, according to organizer Outdoor Power Equipment Institute (OPEI).

Iowa City – October 29, 2026 -- Sixty-three percent of industrial professionals surveyed say fewer than 5% of frontline workers file a hazard, near-miss or safety report each month, or that their site doesn't track the figure, according to the Frontline Risk Study 2026 from Teamforce AI.

Participation is low and static at 38% of sites

Thirty-eight percent of respondents report under 5% monthly participation, and another 25% don't track it. Of the 23 respondents in the under-5% group, 19 say the rate hasn't moved in a year.

Parsippany-Troy Hills – October 29, 2026 -- OLI has released Version 12.7 of its chemistry simulation software with Microsoft Excel import and export, removing the manual data entry that engineers previously needed to move spreadsheet data into OLI Studio.

Woodinville, Wash. – October 29, 2026 -- Group14 Technologies closed a €150 million (about $169 million) Series D equity extension from a new, undisclosed investor, lifting the round to more than $665 million and unlocking a third large-scale battery active materials site in Sagunto, Spain.

Shanghai – October 29, 2026 -- AGIBOT introduced Worken, a proposed framework that measures robots by the productive work they perform rather than by units built or delivered, at its Innovation Day 2026 event. The company also unveiled its AHA3 hardware platform, the GO-3 Preview foundation model and the G2 Max industrial robot.

PITTSBURGH – October 29, 2026 -- Wesco International reported record third-quarter net sales of $7.2 billion, up 17% year over year and 8% sequentially, and raised its full-year 2026 outlook as backlog grew about 80%.

Data center sales rise about 55% to $1.8 billion

Data center sales reached $1.8 billion, up roughly 55% from a year earlier. Non-data center sales rose 7%. Organic sales grew 16.6%, with volume gains in all three segments (CSS, EES and UBS) and a favorable price effect. Organic sales for the first nine months rose 13.9%.

WENZHOU – October 29, 2026 -- Ruizhi Machinery unveiled three paper bag making machines at All in Print China 2026, led by the CS350T, which runs at up to 300 bags per minute and completes size changeovers in 15 minutes. The company presented the CS350T, CS450T and RZFD-250AS at Booth N3A213 during the five-day show at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre.

Mountain View – October 29, 2026 -- xTool has begun worldwide shipping of the X1, a desktop laser engraver and cutter priced from $3,399 to $6,679, built around swappable laser modules that let buyers add capabilities without buying a second machine.

SHANGHAI – October 29, 2026 -- DODGEN supplied devolatilization technology to three Chinese polyolefin elastomer (POE) projects in 2026. Two plants, at CNPC Daqing Petrochemical and Xingchuan New Materials, have started up on the first attempt, and a third customer, Shaanxi Yuneng, has signed a supply contract.