Well-known transportation analyst Amit Mehrotra is leaving Deutsche Bank, and for now at least, Deutsche is halting its coverage of transport-related equities.
Mehrotra is an active observer of the transportation sector, with often multiple updates on a busy earnings day blasted out to his list of email contacts, including FreightWaves. His departure was signaled in an email sent last week that said Deutsche was discontinuing equity coverage of a long list of transportation companies, all of which were under Mehrortra’s purview.
Reached at his home in Atlanta, Mehrotra declined to comment on his status at Deutsche Bank. An email sent to Deutsche Bank’s media relations team had not been responded to by publication time.
A source has confirmed reports that Mehrotra is headed to UBS Group, but he is not expected to be a transportation analyst there. He will be involved in industrial research in some capacity.
The transportation team left behind by Mehrotra’s departure is not said to be leaving the bank, but the announcement of the across-the-board elimination of transportation equity coverage makes clear that for now at least, they won’t be covering transports.
This marks the second time in the past few months that a major Wall Street bank has suspended analysis of the universe of transportation companies it had been covering. Wells Fargo made a similar announcement in March. However, there are reports that Wells Fargo has identified a new transportation equity analyst to head a reconstructed research team.
There were 21 companies Deutsche said it was no longer covering, including several maritime shipping companies, such as Frontline (NYSE: FRO). Mehrotra’s team covered such publicly traded trucking companies as J.B. Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT) and Werner (NASDAQ: WERN); less-than-truckload carriers like Saia (NASDAQ: SAIA), which Mehrotra had been very high on for quite some time, saying earlier this month that he thought its “earnings power can meaningfully surprise to the upside over time”; the Class 1 railroads; and some other logistics companies, such as C.H Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) and GXO Logistics (NYSE: GXO).
Mehrotra might have been most famous for being a thorn in the side of Brad Jacobs when Jacobs was CEO of XPO Ltd. (NYSE: XPO). Deutsche’s research on the company went from being a cheerleader to being a critic, and Mehrotra’s questions on earnings calls often reflected that skepticism and friction. Deutsche ended up dropping coverage of XPO.
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