Uber Turns Over Nearly All Freight Revenue To Truckers Analyst Says

Did not see that coming.

 

Interesting and sad. Let's hope they won't wipe out nearly everybody else in the spot market world. Sometimes it feels easy and convenient but there is no negotiation with Uber. Either you click or not. Forget about establishing so called contacts and relationships. Soulless, so to speak.

 

I suspect that they attract a certain kind of shipper. None of the shippers I work with have attempted to use it, so there's that. Might make more sense for the large distribution center types where they're less concerned about quality of service.

 

Amazon will buy Uber and that would be that for the big brokers.

 

It seems to follow their ride share platform,lose money in order to gain market share. How else do you explain a company with almost no assets that loses millions yearly?

 

Amazon has already started... their own freight broker services

 

Amazon becomes a freight broker
MAY 3, 2019
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They’ve been predicting it for a while. Now it has happened. Amazon is officially a logistics company – a truckload broker to be specific.

OK, that’s not exactly what trucking experts predicted. They expected the retail juggernaut named after a South American river and led by Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, to launch a package business to compete with UPS and Fedex. Amazon has sort of done that on a small scale from individual distribution centers using independent contractors with vans who can easily be exploited. They don’t compete with UPdex in a serious way – at least not yet.

This is different. Now Amazon is acting as a truckload freight broker for shippers, some of whom already sell through Amazon. “Tap into the scale of Amazon as we extend our carrier network to give you best-in-class service at great rates,” says Amazon to shippers on its website at Amazon Sign In.

The site says its “beta” service offers 53-foot dry vans in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. But checking their website, I was quoted a rate to Boston of $791 from Newark, N.J., to be picked up and delivered on the same day. That quote was to a shipper, not a carrier. Last I heard, Boston was in Massachusetts.

Amazon recently offered its Amazon Prime customers one-day shipping instead of its former two-day shipping. But that’s at the consumer level, which probably does not include truckloads. Still, the truckload time requirements hint at an acceleration across Amazon’s supply chain.

On its website, Amazon says it can charge shippers low rates – almost 30% lower than contract rates – because it does not add on a broker fee. Presumably the brokerage service is free.

Why would Amazon give away the service? John Paul Hampstead has a theory. Writing in FreightWaves, he says Amazon is sacrificing cash to grab market share for its brokerage. In fact, when the brokerage service was announced, the stock prices of big logistics providers C.H.Robinson and J.B.Hunt on the NASDAQ and XPO on the New York Stock Exchange all fell.

But Amazon is doing more than expanding a logistics business. It’s also helping its core retail operation.

“By taking no margin during soft freight seasons and keeping trucks running, Amazon will have capacity locked up and ready to move truly staggering e-commerce volumes in November and December,” Hampstead wrote.

According to people I spoke with, Amazon’s no-fee-to-shippers truckload rates that presumably pass through to carriers, rank from level with current spot rates at the top end to just plain lousy at the bottom. Of course, spot rates at the moment are not great. They hardly compare with 2018, a banner year for trucking.

No one is surprised Amazon is setting itself up to make more money – if not now, then in the near future. But at the rates I saw quoted, no carrier or owner-operator is going to get rich in the deal.

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Certainly. I posted about it as well as yourself and others.

My vision is this for a idea.

Amazon, Uber etc are the only two left standing when CH Robinson and other top broker houses eviscerate their own money and hollow out too much to support anymore operations in a VERY soft environment, like a drained ocean. Where you gonna go and survive?

Once that is cleared out, Amazon intends to raise rates and so on, truckers will cheer at 5.00 a mile and so on our economy will buckle a little, but since we are lurching into Negative interest etc that's ok.

Thats a sort of a vision of one possible future.

 

They say the best way to make a million dollars in the trucking/freight industry is to start with $2 Million. I guess we will see how deep the Uber pockets are. Seems like investors (and in their case shareholders) wouldn’t put up with this for long, even to try and steal market share, but who knows. In a day and age where FAANG stocks are a bellwether if economic activity, I guess anything is possible.