Freight Brokerage

Gross revenue and margins are in the most difficult stage of the cycle right now.

Freightquote by C.H. Robinson brings Robinson’s information advantage, capacity, and technology to small businesses.

FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller joins the ‘On the Spot’ crew at FreightWaves Live in Chicago to deliver the weekly freight rates report.

FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller and Dynamo Ventures partner Jon Bradford shared their insights and opinions on the digital freight brokerage industry and its investors.

The future of freight brokerage is a renewed focus on people.

McElroy wants to see a more efficient brokerage industry. He believes competition is promoting that.

With experience in both freight brokering and non-asset-based logistics, David Broering addresses the challenges facing the ever-changing trucking industry.

Investments in two AI companies in the past five years made Transplace’s optimization more powerful.

Analysts now want CHRW to cut costs.

Bill Driegert discussed both the Canadian and Polish expansions.

Carrier411 monitors trucking companies to rate their safety and performance protecting brokers from unsafe carriers.

Biesterfeld: “We expect that North American routing guides will continue to reset at lower prices.”

RMIS fulfills 97 percent of requests for insurance certificates within a minute.

In a tough freight environment, the Chicago brokerage outpaced Wall Street’s expectations.

Gillihan plans to build a process-driven sales floor that can scale.

Executives from Parade, CoLane, Forager, and Trucker Tools discussed the current state and future of brokerage digitization.

The Backhaulers, Robinson, and Coyote veteran is back to build a brokerage on his own terms.

Matt Silver wants to automate cross-border freight; an industry that many find difficult to manage.

Kar believes a driver’s relationship with an OEM will no longer end after the sale of a truck. That relationship will continue over the lifespan of the vehicle with the introduction of in-cab service technologies.

Truckload carriers are falling off of out-of-network freight; it ends up with brokers.

C.H. Robinson talked to thousands of shippers and carriers. What the company learned prompted them to invest $1 billion into technology.

Traditional freight brokerages are ramping up technological spending to keep pace with the industry.

Expedited brokers said the best months of 2019 are ahead.

The drop trailer pool expands to Los Angeles while Bundles will be nationwide.

Meier will work with Bobby Harris on developing and executing a long-term vision for BlueGrace.

Quebec-based carrier and brokerage Energy Transportation Group is expanding its presence in the U.S. with the recent addition of a Chattanooga office.

CHRW is facing the toughest competitive landscape in decades, but still has a scale advantage and is investing in tech appropriately.

Brian Laung Aoaeh discusses innovation, technology, and disruption in the freight brokerage market.

The move signals the shift from a tech startup to a mature logistics operation.

Brokers’ gross margins will compress unless they get shippers on board.

Rates and rejections into the Southeast are elevated as trailers and tractors are staged for disaster relief.

Spooked shippers are trying to lock in capacity ahead of the holiday push.

The marketplace for truckload transportation is fragmented and opaque. Relationships between shippers and carriers are tenuous at best, forged and broken by wild swings in capacity availability and rates per mile. In this white paper, Transfix and FreightWaves define the problems distorting the marketplace for truckload transportation, discuss how carriers think about their assets, explain the role of technology in reducing empty miles, and sketch out the economic dynamics that come into play when the marketplace is optimized to free up capacity at the right price.

The seventh annual Games were the biggest yet.

Morgan Stanley, Susquehanna, and Deutsche Bank cut their price targets; Stifel maintained.

Ben Thrower writes about nearshoring manufacturing, which has gone on for decades. He also writes about the potential for nearshoring services, a new opportunity for both U.S. and Latin American businesses.

Companies that build a dedicated M&A program return more value to shareholders.

Landstar missed the bottom-end of its guidance range as expected. The company sees weakness in truckload fundamentals continuing through the third quarter.

ECHO faced a tough quarter with soft spot volumes and unexpected tightness in June.

SunteckTTS, a top 10 brokerage, is reportedly looking for a 10x EBITDA multiple.

Capacity has returned to freight markets and spot rates are falling against “contract.”

Michigan State University and the FreightWaves Freight Intel Group have developed research on spot market freight. Read about that research here.

All of the carriers on Transplace’s platform will integrate with Descartes MacroPoint by January 2020.

Rivigo, a freight and logistics startup in India, has raised $65 million in a Series E round led by existing investors Warburg Pincus and SAIF Partners. The startup plans to use the new capital to further expand its network and tech infrastructure. Founded in 2014 by Gazal Kalra and Deepak Garg, Rivigo owns and operates […]

Capital Logistics is the newest member of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA). Read about the company, as well as BiTA’s efforts to develop blockchain standards for transportation and logistics.

Uber Freight moved 1,500 loads for Ocean Spray last year, and the shipper says the relationship will continue to grow.

In partnership with Carggo… small freight brokers now have a white-label solution for automated load matching.

Brokers said there are lingering trouble spots from Road Check week, but markets are already softening.

Michael Lewis wrote “Moneyball” about the tactics Billy Beane used to improve the Oakland A’s. Read Zach Strickland’s take on using moneyball tactics in the freight market.

The FreightWaves Intel Group surveyed over 800 carriers, shippers and brokers about the entry of Amazon into online freight brokerage. Read about the survey’s results and what respondents think Amazon will do to their businesses.

CarrierDirect’s CEO Peter Rentschler stops by FreightWaves.

Freight brokers report upward pressure on spot rates and still expect robust summer volumes.

The good news is that Evan Armstrong of Armstrong & Associates thinks that U.S. third-party logistics providers’ (3PLs) revenues will grow at a 7.7 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years, and brokers will become more productive as artificial intelligence automates up to 50 percent of their repetitive tasks. The bad […]

Transfix, the venture capital-backed digital freight marketplace based in New York City, announced that Ahmad El-Dardiry joined the company as its new chief revenue officer. El-Dardiry comes to Transfix from a 19-year stint at Intel Corporation, where most recently he managed cloud computing, memory and storage enterprise sales in the Americas, Asia and global industry […]

Landstar announced that it may not be able to meet the low-end of its guidance range as truckload spot market fundamentals remain weak.

Canadian freight brokerage buys Ontario-based non-asset firm that specializes in the manufacturing sector.

To gain insight into the shifting landscape of freight brokerage, sometimes it’s best to follow the money, not the shiny new technology. The freight brokerage industry is undergoing a wave of rapid transformation. Incumbent asset-based carriers are aggressively growing their logistics offerings in pursuit of counter-cyclical margin and new digital entrants are redefining the upper […]

Freight brokerage in the United States is mostly made up of small companies that have trouble scaling their businesses beyond certain revenue thresholds due to unstructured processes, under-utilization of technology, and ad-hoc recruiting and training. Highly concentrated customer bases and revenue-generating employees wasting their time on administrative tasks eventually become constraints on growth. At a […]

Other Bets revenue, primarily consisting of Uber Freight, increased 263 percent year-over-year to $145 million.

Market expert Charley Dehoney explores how freight brokers can stay relevant in a rapidly changing environment.

Cargo Chief provides freight brokers with a booking bot that gets carrier offers, counter-bids on loads and autonomously books load on consent.

Market expert Brian Aoaeh writes about the impact of market disruption on the freight brokerage sector. Learn how Amazon, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other disruptors will change the business…

Eminent, founded in 2003, is made up of 37 consultants.

Leading transportation management and logistics service provider SEND Transportation has integrated Trucker Tools’ Smart Capacity into its operations.

Widening margins in NAST, especially truckload brokerage, led the way for Robinson.

But Ryder’s 3PL division, Supply Chain Solutions, is expected to go into negative year-over-year growth next quarter.

Amazon could build a zero-margin equivalent of C.H. Robinson inside the ‘shipping costs’ line on its P&L without anyone noticing.

Amazon could build a zero-margin equivalent of C.H. Robinson inside the ‘shipping costs’ line on its P&L without anyone noticing.

Despite a crash in truckload spot prices (approximately 50% of ECHO revenue), the freight brokerage beat analyst expectations.

Wintrust’s working capital lines of credit leave brokerages with more control than equity raises and have lower cost-of-capital than factoring.

P&S Transportation added Celadon Logistics to TA Services, its asset-light brokerage.

Better talent at a lower cost improves brokers’ cash flows.

Have a strategy that you believe in and don’t forget to price in volatility, Feig said.

Transfix is betting that its carriers care more about asset utilization than rate per mile.

The Chicago-based freight brokerage is operating at a $100 million run rate.

Another fast-growth brokerage in Freight Alley pops up.

GlobalTranz more than doubled EBITDA in less than a year.

Circle 8 is GlobalTranz’s ninth acquisition since January 2017.

Scott Hagen, the Corporate Controller, will be the interim CFO, and Robinson Fresh will be lumped in with ‘Other’ services in CHRW’s financial reporting.

Port container volumes, railroad volumes, and truckload volumes are all down year-over-year.

The feature is intended to save carriers time and money that they would spend searching for and booking loads.

The succession makes perfect sense and is a step in the right direction.

High-growth business models make sourcing talent even more difficult for freight brokerages.

Valuations will stay high and capital is readily accessible, bringing both sellers and buyers to market.

We checked in with executives from Edge Logistics, Avenger Logistics, and Convoy to see how brokers are handling YOY volume growth.

A healthy month-end volume uptick hasn’t tightened capacity, allowing brokers to stay in their happy place.

Small brokerages are confident they can grow quickly in a softening freight environment and trend-line GDP growth.

The boundary between spot and contract pricing is always shifting, especially when freight markets are volatile.

The largest Canadian freight brokerage purchased a 3PL concentrated in the Southeastern United States.

Convoy CEO Dan Lewis said that digital brokerage margins would expand until most participants adopted low-cost structure, then start compressing.

Today’s selloff on soft revenue growth guidance went too far, according to Stifel’s Bruce Chan and Susquehanna’s Bascome Majors.

After a day of choppy trading, a consensus seemed to emerge that CHRW was well-positioned to grow net revenues even in a re-balancing freight market.

CHRW grew earnings per share by 24%, top line revenue by 4.5%; and net revenues by 13%.

Spot-heavy 3PLs are looking for freight while brokers with good contract relationships are getting rewarded.

The combined brokerage expects to do $200 million in revenue this year.

Capacity is as loose as ever, but some freight brokerages told us they don’t trust the market to stay cool.

Shippers aren’t shy about moving contract rates down in RFP negotiations, and even brokers are surprised at how cheap capacity has become.

Asset-based carriers think contract rates are going up; brokers think they’re going down.

We spoke to brokers from Avenger, Axle, LYNC, Redwood, MoLo, and K & L about their hopes and fears for January freight.

Morgan Stanley likes asset-based carriers while Stifel is bullish on 3PLs, and the banks don’t agree on what the business risks to C.H. Robinson are.