At the market
What’s going on here?
It seems every week some company is laying off more and more of its staff. Last week, Walmart announced layoffs of 200 people, Amazon said it’s cutting 9,000 jobs and Retail Dive reports more layoffs from Bed Bath & Beyond. FreightWaves’ JP Hampstead gets into the thick of it. Census Bureau numbers on seasonally unadjusted e-commerce retail sales were up 6% year over year as of Q4 2022, but remember that these numbers can benefit from...
Truck driving is one of the largest professions in the U.S., with 3.5 million people strong, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But despite this, most trucking companies are constantly searching for experienced and reliable candidates.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there are approximately 259,000 job openings for heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers each year, and everybody in the transportation industry, especially hiring managers, knows filling those positions isn’t easy.
Compet...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/navigating-the-modern-driver-hiring-process
Technology-enabled trucking company CloudTrucks announced Tuesday it raised $115 million in series B funding led by Tiger Global with participation from Menlo Ventures and previous investors including Caffeinated Capital, Craft Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Abstract, BTV and Kindred Ventures.
The round also included investment from freight forwarder Flexport and angel investors Eric Wu, CEO of Opendoor, and Michael Ovtiz, former president of The Walt Disney Co.
The trucking company has raised a...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/cloudtrucks-secures-115m-to-lower-the-barrier-of-entry-for-drivers
It is well known that desperation breeds innovation, and many across the logistics industry have certainly found themselves desperate for capacity this year. In the past, the complexities of full-truckload automation have inspired many companies to focus their efforts elsewhere. This all changed during 2021.
API integrations with carriers have allowed for full-scale automation on the less-than-truckload side for years. Automation has been much trickier on the full-truckload side. While the...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/industry-makes-strides-toward-full-truckload-automation
Today is the 103rd anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. It ended at 11:00 p.m. on November 11, 1918.
The total number of military and civilian casualties in World War I was more than 40 million; about 20 million deaths and 21 million wounded. The deaths included 9.7 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians.
Like most wars, the casualties were a tragedy, whether they were on the “right” side or the “wrong” one…
By Melissa Forman-Barenblit, SVP, Chief Strategy Officer at TriumphPay
For such a fast-moving industry, trucking has traditionally been slower to embrace new technologies. But the tides are turning, and the days of the same old, same old are waning.
The past decade has brought about a technological renaissance of sorts to the trucking industry, gaining even more momentum in 2017 after the ELD mandate went into effect. What was once a contentious debate over the move from paper to electronic logs...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/no-better-time-than-now-to-adopt-new-technologies
FreightWaves Classics articles look at various aspects of the transportation industry’s history. If there are topics that you think would be of interest, please send them to [email protected].
The many industries that make up the world of freight have undergone tremendous change over the past several decades. Each week, FreightWaves explores the archives of American Shipper’s nearly 70-year-old collection of shipping and maritime publications to showcase interesting freight stories of...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/freightwaves-flashback-e-shipping-blues
By Omar Singh, president and founder, Surge Transportation
Until recent history, all of the top brokerages have been profitable companies. This is not the case with all of the investor-backed technology companies currently taking up market share, which leads me to ask the question: Is it better to be a technology company learning supply chain or a supply chain company learning to adopt technology?
There is an old joke in our industry: “How do you become a millionaire in the trucking business? You...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/tech-in-logistics-disruption-or-distraction
The introduction of 5G — alongside widespread adoption of 4G LTE-enabled devices — has prompted major players to shut down older networks. Companies relying on older cellular networks, including 3G, CDMA and 2G, to run their remote monitoring and telematics applications will soon start to experience performance issues and reliability drops ahead of widespread network shutdowns.
As 3G support is phased out, companies operating devices that utilize 2G or 3G and are not compatible with 4G LTE...
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/still-relying-on-3g-networks-it-is-time-for-an-upgrade
The transportation industry has witnessed the transformative power of technology over the past several years. From electronic logging devices (ELDs) to virtual document sharing, digital tools have helped streamline operations in pretty much every segment of the industry. In an environment as hands-on as trucking, however, bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds can prove challenging.
Digital tools lose a lot of their potential usefulness when they exist in silos, unable to work...
https://s29755.pcdn.co/news/tech-solutions-prove-useless-without-real-world-collaboration