Truck brokers

The less-than-truckload market is stabilizing, with opportunities for higher prices and profits in the second quarter, but the long-term outlook is still clouded by tariffs and geopolitical conflict.

Demand returned sharply last month as shippers, facing surging truckload rates, looked to intermodal for lower-cost capacity alternatives.

Shippers are no longer clinging to the hope that rate increases were a temporary winter phenomenon due to snowstorms and frigid weather, the company said, noting that a fundamental reset of the market is afoot.

Long-sought regulatory reforms within the Canadian trucking industry could tighten capacity and cause cross-border rates to rise.

The product launched this week by Triumph, called Capacity Intelligence, allows brokers to identify lanes where it needs a deeper pool of reliable carriers.

The software company with a network of thousands of proprietary roadside cameras has been primarily serving freight brokers with capacity sourcing and fraud mitigation tools.

The leading US truck brokerage said a rate spike due to winter weather does not signal a stronger trucking market, while international freight demand remains tepid.

Echo’s Doug Waggoner said the opportunity to acquire ITS came as part of his company’s virtually constant search for potential additions.

The deal will create a company with more than $5 billion in revenue across truckload brokerage, managed transportation services, and port-related offerings.

The Transportation Intermediaries Association launched a hotline that its members can use to report suspected occurrences of cargo fraud and theft, regardless of the dollar value involved.

California is revoking 17,000 non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses, while a US court has ordered a temporary stay on the US Department of Transportation’s new non-domiciled CDL rule.

Companies large and small — from C.H. Robinson to ShipAngel — are unveiling new suites of AI agents to augment their customers’ capacities and help them organize unstructured data.

A range of vendors have emerged in recent years with a singular focus on improving coordination of truckload arrivals, keying on load prioritization and performance metrics.

Supply chain control, not just cost, is the priority for shippers that have built up in-house truck fleets and increasingly are using them for more than outbound deliveries.

Augment and Happy Robot are the most recent examples of investors betting that artificial intelligence agents will transform the operations of logistics providers.

The race among providers to provide the dominant and trusted US load board is ramping up and is further fueled by growing concerns about freight theft.

The fifth-largest freight broker in the US will absorb FreightSaver, which, similar to Echo, focuses on managed transportation services for shippers.

The purchase of Outgo, founded in 2022, is meant to help DAT gather more transactional data but also to make its freight marketplace more complete for carriers and brokers.

In launching TruSygnal, Burns Logistics CEO Ed Burns wanted to provide a way to allow small carriers to create relationships with shippers that typically shy away from brokers.

US importers and their Mexican logistics and customs partners are experiencing longer wait times when northbound shipments arrive at border towns, and that’s inevitably raising transportation costs and leading to supply chain disruptions.

Cargo theft in trucking and on the rails has been a problem for years, but it’s getting harder to combat as criminals become more sophisticated in their tactics.

AFS Logistics and TD Cowen are forecasting a decline in truckload pricing and moderation in the LTL market as shippers and carriers alike navigate a new trade reality.

The $12 million investment in Cargado will be used to expand the load board with other tools for freight brokers to tap into cross-border freight growth.

The partnership will see SMC3 provide less-than-truckload rating, booking and tracking data into Turvo’s transportation management system, which primarily serves US freight brokers and third-party logistics providers.

As shippers race to get goods from Mexico and Canada into the US before full implementation of 25% tariffs Wednesday, they’re beginning to rethink supply chains.

In a move to better utilize its leased pool of trailers, Uber Freight has partnered with software vendor Optimal Dynamics to bundle loads for drivers across 10 trailer pool locations.

Acquisitions continue in the domestic freight market, with Descartes buying 3GTMS to continue a decade-long spree of purchases.

Groups representing transportation providers, retailers and manufacturers are calling for Congress to create a cargo theft task force blending the resources of multiple agencies as cargo crime spreads.

Acquisition activity in the truckload space continues, with price benchmarking vendor Greenscreens.ai the latest to sell.

project44 is the latest established software provider to release a suite of artificial intelligence agents amid a torrent of startups building tools for logistics providers and shippers.

The largest US freight broker expects the first quarter of 2025 to be weak for trucking as the freight recession remains in place, but it is converting more customers to use its services for ocean freight.

The acquisition is part of a surge in logistics M&A transactions aimed at simplifying access to systems and services for shippers and brokers.

More uptake of transactional pricing in the less-than-truckload market is a sign that some carriers are targeting smaller or more infrequent LTL shippers.

Shippers must weigh the merits of a single-source relationship on drayage through key ports over splitting volume among regional and national carriers, or even brokers.

Acquisitions, new product releases and fresh investment among companies catering to truckload brokers speak to an industry wrestling with the need to make things easier for customers.

The acquisition of Trucker Tools will give DAT access to carrier positioning data to arm its truckload broker customers.

While US customers are importing more than usual, C.H. Robinson Worldwide’s CEO Dave Bozeman doesn’t see a ‘major material’ pull-forward of goods in the last weeks before a potential US longshore strike.

A lawsuit filed Thursday in US District Court alleges the fourth-largest US freight broker e Worldwide Express engaged in a campaign of retaliation with a former agent.

A 30% increase in the total value of transportation and logistics acquisitions over the last six months signals a stronger market for M&A emerging in 2025, PwC says in a market report.

A partnership between C.H. Robinson Worldwide and Highway seeks to push carrier ID systems deeper into truck brokerage networks as shippers demand action to prevent cargo theft by fraudsters.