Logistics Management - June 2010

A SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT TO
Special Report: Top 50 Global 3PLs
A&A’s Top 50 Global 3PLs .............................Page 50
A&A’s Top 30 Domestic 3PLs ........................Page 52
The three dimensions
of distribution excellence .............................Page 54
TOP 50 GLOBAL 3PLs:
Modest gains ahead
By Patrick
Burnson,
Executive
Editor
Having hit bottom in 2009, the 3PL sector is headed for a
rebound. Analysts say that some providers will continue
to expand globally even if their corporate identities remain
fixed to sovereign states. However, research also indicates
that near-shoring is a growing trend, giving “domestic”
players more of an advantage.
In lock step with the global economic nosedive, domestic revenues for the third-party logistics
(3PL) market sank last year.
“It wasn’t pretty,” says Evan Armstrong, president of Stoughton, Wisc.-based Armstrong & Associates.
He says that the only thing the top players—both global and domestic—had in common
was that “none of them made much money.”
According to Armstrong’s 2010 U.S. and Global Third-Party Logistics Analysis, the international
transportation management (ITM) segment of the 3PL services market took the biggest hit. Its
gross revenue (turnover) fell 23.7 percent as total U.S. import and export ocean twenty-foot equivalent
units (TEUs) dropped 12.3 percent. Airfreight metric tons dropped similarly with reductions at
JFK and the Chicago airports exceeding 20 percent. As prices dove in the face of soft demand, net
revenues (gross margins) for airfreight shrank by 18.9 percent. Expeditors International, the largest
U.S. freight forwarder, saw gross revenues decrease 27 percent and net revenue decrease 14 percent.
The good news is that first quarter 2010 results have included double digit improvements in
46S June 2010 • Logistics Management