Estonia Freight Forwarding Services
Air, Sea & Road Freight Between Estonia and the UK

Follow the money or follow the flag? Politics clouds port investment

In the seven years since TOC Americas last took place in Cartagena, global laden container volumes have slipped about 10% below where they would have been without the multiple disruptions that have hit the industry since 2018, according to Dinesh Sharma, director at Drewry Maritime Advisors. Sharma's research measured growth from 2018 against forecasts of where the industry had imagined it would be today last time they met in Cartagena. Predicting the future, he said, was and is not easy. Transshipment hubs grew by about 6% a year on average over that period, against roughly 3% for gateway ports and 1.5% for the underlying economies they serve. The inefficiency, he said, is no longer contained at the big transshipment hubs: it is flowing through to gateways too, leaving Latin America's overall throughput an estimated 2-3% below his 2018 projection. Performance varies sharply by market, Sharma added: Mexico and Brazil are growing more slowly, while Colombia is seeing strong consumer spending and rising real wages, with Peru, Chile and Ecuador following a similar pattern. Offering a geopolitical insight into the direction of travel, Henry Ziemer, of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, said the current political situation only further complicated the commercial picture. Ziemer argued the Americas are becoming strategically important precisely because the rest of the world has become more violently contested. "I think the Americas are becoming a key hedge, geopolitical hedge, in a more contentious world," he said. A tug of war over ownership That attention, Ziemer said, is not without cost. Washington's growing interest in the region's infrastructure raises the odds that port decisions get caught up in politics rather than commercial logic. "Who controls ports and maritime infrastructure matters now more than ever," he said, warning that US agencies do not always have full visibility of who actually owns or runs a given facility. "Ports can sometimes be caught in a bit of a tug of war where different agencies are acting under imperfect information about ownership structures, about operational control," he said. Who wins Panama's next tenders Ziemer's clearest example was Panama, which is running caretaker arrangements at Balboa and Cristóbal through APM Terminals and TiL while preparing to tender two new ports. "There's an expectation from the administration in the United States that a U.S. company will be basically receiving one of those ports," he said. He questioned whether that expectation matches the market: "Will they be the most competitive option? Will they adhere to the specifications that the Panamanian government is looking for?" For Ziemer, that is the sharper risk, not the cost of capital. "The real dilemma is not so much in the financing side, but in the question of which countries and which companies are delivering the infrastructure capability," he said. Reading the money, not the flags Other panelists read the same uncertainty in more commercial terms. Natalia Gil, economic investigations leader at Grupo Puerto de Cartagena (GPC), told the panel that capacity figures increasingly conceal differences in connectivity and reliability. Her team's analysis of routes across the Caribbean and Panama between 2023 and 2026 found that a container line changes a route, a service or a parameter of a service on average every 3.9 days, with the toughest quarters for Cartagena, including the Panama Canal drought and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal, also the quarters when the port won the most new services. Nicolas Romero, regional head Latin America at Pacific International Lines (PIL), said the line is redesigning its ships around the region's constraints rather than waiting for ports to catch up: "we take the challenge to adapt the fleet to the needs of the terminal." Enrique Piqueras, chief executive of PSA Panama, argued the bigger bottleneck in most Latin American countries sits outside the terminal gate altogether, a problem he said he had seen repeat in Peru, Colombia, Argentina and Panama. "Competitiveness isn't given by the port ... it's given by the environment," he said. Asked by an audience member from the Panama Canal Authority how to read where geopolitics is heading, Ziemer pointed away from announcements and towards capital flows, and towards countries with existing ties to Washington such as Panama, Colombia and Mexico. Sharma agreed the political backdrop was real, whoever occupies the White House. "As much as you like the current administration or dislike the current administration, what this has resulted is in a great big shakeup," he said, pointing to a shift from integrated tariff structures towards shorter-lived bilateral trade frameworks that add short-haul volume to ports without necessarily adding profit. But asked where capital was actually landing, he pointed to his own data rather than Washington's intentions: "If we just look at the expansions happening within Latin America, the vast majority of them are brownfield expansions." The gap between the two readings showed again when Sharma was pressed on how he weighs geopolitics against his own projections. "We just take what Henry says and we convert them into numbers," he said.

CH Robinson bets its AI army can outflank forwarding rivals

CH Robinson is deploying AI agents to recommend freight routings, prepare quotes, and process ocean bookings, arguing that its proprietary technology and customer data will widen its competitive advantage in global forwarding. The expansion into ocean shipping, airfreight, and customs brokerage includes tasks requiring more than a dozen agents working together, according to the forwarder. "As we've brought our AI playbook to global forwarding, the benefits keep compounding," said Mike Short, president of Global Forwarding. "Customers have information they need sooner. Data is more consistent. Processes are more predictable." But the announcement also reveals how little automation earlier booking technology achieved. "Before agentic AI, we'd developed digital booking forms and data exchange setups with customers, but over the course of about 10 years achieved only about 5% automation for ocean and air booking requests," said chief technology officer Mike Neill. "Why was that such a tough hill to climb? Primarily, because you quote your customer, then it's their suppliers booking with you. A customer might have 50 suppliers. With our agentic AI, all those booking requests no longer need to be handled manually." The forwarder did not outline what percentage of automation was expected, and Mr Neill acknowledged: "We have more work to do automating all the steps for booking, but this is already a major leap forward." Its pricing agents have determined and delivered more than 80,000 quotes for over 3,600 customers. The company says quotes previously taking a day for airfreight and two to three days for ocean freight now take two to three minutes. The work goes beyond retrieving a freight rate. Agents interpret shipping requirements, seek information from external parties, and assess routing options and charges at origin and destination. Mr Short pointed to the complexity of pricing shipments from Shanghai, where the choice of port and terminal affected inland transport costs and fees. "The terminal fees at origin and destination change constantly. So another AI agent checks their websites every day and monitors emails for fee notices. That way people in two different time zones don't have to call every terminal for every price quote." Where customers have not specified a port, agents can suggest gateways, inland transport by truck, rail, or barge, and consolidation centres. Mr Short made rather a sweeping claim for CH Robinson's position: "With our maturity in using AI to augment our talented experts, only CH Robinson is equipped to transform something as complicated as freight forwarding." The firm argues that faster processing brings practical advantages for shippers trying to secure capacity or respond to disruption. "When plans change or disruptions occur, customers can more quickly evaluate a new routing, mode of shipping, schedule, or price," said Mr Short. Ocean booking agents launched in China in August, with deployment across the rest of Asia planned for Q4, and a global rollout expected in Q1 27. Pricing agents, introduced for North American LCL shipments in 2025, now also cover FCL and airfreight across several regions, with further expansion planned. In US customs brokerage, AI and automation classify the documents, extract data, and request missing paperwork. CH Robinson claims a 23% reduction in time spent on the affected work, with brokers focusing on validation and compliance. It's still hard to tell what the impact will be on the company's financials; but Q2 forwarding operating profit rose 18.8% year on year, while average employee headcount fell 16.6%. (It's worth noting that those figures cover an earlier stage of automation, and don't isolate AI's contribution.) Chief strategy and innovation officer Arun Rajan argued that CH Robinson's advantage lay in combining its technology with operational data. "Our AI agents continue to operate on 100 trillion data points and a context layer of customer-specific information that simply cannot be replicated elsewhere," he said. "While our 450 in-house software engineers and data scientists are still innovating in our trucking and 4PL businesses, now we're using those advantages to widen our competitive moat in global forwarding."

Investors bid up 'golden goose' DSV - bar set high for Kuehne

DSV's third-quarter (Q3 26) update out today unequivocally proves that the Danes are the freight forwarding benchmark where it matters, making top dollar in air and sea. Enjoying a Q3 conversion rate (CR: Ebit/gross profit = 45.8%) at its highest level since the start of the Schenker integration, Air & Sea's operating margin was equally outstanding, reaching... (Click to expand the table below and all others) ... 9.4% in the three months to the end of September. For comparable purposes, look backwards from Q3 24, full focus on core Air & Sea operations, just as the Schenker deal was secured... through Q4 24 and then Q1 25 - that's the last quarter without 100% of Schenker (deal closed on 30 Apr '25). The CR read, respectively: 50.5% (Q3 24); 48.3% (Q4 24); and 46.3% at last reading in the first quarter of 2025, right before two months worth of Schenker business was partly consolidated in Q2 25. Ebit margin over those three quarters rose sequentially quarter on quarter from 10.8% to 11.3% in Q4 24, and then dropped to 10% as the first Schenker hit was taken. We are at 9.4% now, getting to over 10% soon enough too, base case. Indeed. Positive earnings momentum in Q3 this year led to Ebit growth of +18.9% year on year in Q3, driven by a reduced cost base, as DSV points out - thank headcount management in the Air & Sea unit, outperforming the fall in volumes on the downslope. More freight is not necessarily the answer, anyway, to paraphrase CEO Jens Lund's remarks in the call with analysts - but high-yielding freight is, while regarding volumes, expected to plateau, DSV is at an inflection point. That said. Both air and ocean freight yields - as gauged by: gross profit per unit - climbed, yet unlikely summited if recent trends are anything to go by, reaching Dkr8,936 ($1,341.8) and Dkr4,142 ($622), respectively, their top readings since Schenker started being consolidated. Both readings are a bit soft compared to ex-Schenker data from Q3 25 (more here: pages 8 & 9, drawing from Q3 25 results), yet they were definitely satisfactory. Equally solid was the performance in Contract Logistics, with Q3 26 Ebit soaring +50% year on year - there are some adjustments to be made there as well as in Air & Sea, but all good. Looking forward, also bear in mind the contract logistics market is expected to grow at mid-single-digit rates, DSV's crystal ball says. As flagged by DeskOne earlier today, reinstating stock buybacks* is a small step in the right direction (also recall DeskOne's 8 October take: 'Investors scream: BRING BACK THE BUYBACKS'). (*However small in size, only $225m, the authorisation was welcome, and needed... given "obligations for share options", DSV CFO told the analysts; share count will marginally shrink, about 1%, starting today to 1 Feb 27.) 'Golden goose' DSV in sub-Dkr1,200/share value territory, as we argued a week ago, in early trade delivered +9% capital appreciation on the stock market today, trading as high as Dkr1,300 from around Dkr1,150 last week. +13% or so: not a bad Premium call, after all, it seemed at that point in time, with 12-month trailing (diluted and adjusted earnings per share) just above Dkr56. Then Master Lund decided to lead the show, and the stock traded as high as Dkr1.363.5, +13.5%. Which leads us to two considerations: the Dkr1,301 (early-trade) level highlighted below... ... is bang in line with the pre-hammering level of exactly a month ago; then, thanks to that and additional daily gains, DSV has recouped nearly $5.8bn of lost value in just a few hours - as much as CH Robinson valued RXO at takeover enterprise value, just saying. (By comparison: 'Dead wood' at Sfr230/share Kuehne + Nagel: +0.2% in early trade then in negative territory, -0.2% at last check, just what it deserves at the moment, given its rich trading multiples... while new US leadership caught our attention overnight ahead of DSV's release.) Also worth noting: DSV's net leverage is still high but free cash flow looks good, implying the group's share repurchase programme is conservative in size. To the bad news now. Volumes in air and sea were just ok-ish (more here: pages 7 & 8), almost unsatisfactory. On top of that, DSV assumes the addressable global air and sea freight markets will grow "around mid-single digits" this year, while in the current quarter (Q4 26), it predicts volume growth for Air & Sea "below the market and with slightly lower average gross profit yields compared to Q3 2026". Elsewhere where it remains troubled - the asset-heavy road business sucks: coveted synergies delayed to next year, as widely expected - it also expects "flat to low-single-digit growth for the road freight market for the remainder of the year". What else not to like? Total workforce is on its way up for the first time sequentially by nearly 1,200 (FTE) heads to 148,405 versus 159,490 (73,402 pre-Schenker deal) since the same quarter last year. But that may end up being a blessing in disguise if business with the hyperscalers keeps rolling in. There are signs it will, based on Lund's thoughtful remarks. Still, please bear with the bear: 2027-2030 tech/AI/whatever-related synergies are not worth the paper they are written on, although there's faith in those targets. DSV also narrowed its full-year Ebit guidance, yet the Dkr24.5bn mid-point is unchanged. Bernstein today - noting DSV is "capable of repurchasing c.Dkr6bn [stock] per quarter once it hits run-rate earnings power with a balance sheet at target leverage (<2x, we expect trends to c.1.5x)" - painted a neat picture of a business that is still healing, where Road will get better soon, if you trust management. Today's update was, overall, a good exercise aimed at building confidence, restoring trust in a 0.5%-yielding stock that anyway, lest you forget, still trades just +8% higher than at closing on Lund's Day One as group CEO, 1 Feb 2024. Classic relief rally, for now, but one that was very much needed.