Expeditors International of Washington, Inc. (EXPD) Discusses Geopolitical Risks and Trade Tensions Impacting Europe, Russia, US, and China Transcript

Suryo Nugroho

[Audio Gap]

Now I am excited to introduce the speaker who will be presenting today, Melissa Taylor. So Melissa is Onyx’s Director of Geopolitical Research. She oversees the delivery of geopolitical and policy analysis at Onyx, so providing clients with actionable insights to navigate changing world. Her work in risk advisory and analysis for multinationals at the intersection of geopolitics and supply chains has spanned over 15 years, and she holds a Masters in supply chain, transportation and logistics from the University of Washington.

So with that, over to you, Melissa.

Melissa Taylor

[Audio Gap] a little bit of an update on the energy crisis, but I’m really going to zoom in on two of the key issues that we discussed really in our larger outlook. So this is the January 2026 outlook. And essentially, what it’s highlighting is that EU-Russia is likely to continue to escalate and there’s a rising risk of clashes. Now that’s absolutely kind of played out. We are seeing escalation in the Ukraine-Russia engagement, we’re seeing Europe more directly involved. And we are seeing the risk to Russia continue to grow. And at this point, there’s kind of — it’s in a must get worse to get better kind of place. There’s some real risk to the Russian position, particularly in Crimea, and there is increasingly signs that we may see some de-escalation on the horizon.

When we look at the EU and U.S., now this one is a little less clear. So we had a very high risk for the EU-U.S. relationship. We’ve seen the U.S. really engaged in Venezuela and Iran. And that’s really kind