J.B. Hunt Intermodal

Google is your friend.

 

Then I can't help you.

 

I'm not an expert on Intermodal freight, but I think you're misunderstanding what's happening.

The containers that you see come off of the steamship lines. They're from China or wherever they're from.

Let's say containers are delivered to the port of New Jersey. From there, trucks will either go into the port and directly pull those containers out and deliver them if they're delivered locally, or those containers get put onto a train and they get shipped to whatever destination they go to and then from there they get put onto a chassis and the truck will deliver it to wherever it's going locally. Then the container and the chassis gets returned empty to where the truck picked it up.

There is no cross docking and the containers I do not believe are ever loaded locally and then put on a rail train. To the best of my knowledge that is only freight that comes from overseas. I have hauled containers before, like I said I'm not an expert, but the containers are always round trip Freight meaning you take it loaded and deliver it and the empty has to come back to the rail yard.

Your questions about can another company do that I don't understand. Any company can pull container Freight but the steamship lines will not talk to you unless you have at least 10 or 15 trucks. So a one truck operator cannot go make a deal with the steamship lines and haul for them.

What happens is that your local trucking company that has 20 or 30 trucks available gets that Freight either directly from the steamship lines or from someone like JB Hunt or whatever the case is and then you lease your one truck on with them and you work only for them pulling that freight.

You have no idea whether that freight is direct or whether it's been brokered to the trucking company you're working for once or twice or three times or who knows? That's why when you lease on to a company the question you have to ask yourself is what percentage of what percentage are you getting? Most likely you will never get an answer to that question.

So if the local trucking company with 20 or 30 trucks is getting the loads directly from the steamship lines then let's say that load pays $500. I think about the average percentage the owner operator gets is 75% so you would get 75% of that load which is $375.

But if they get the load from another broker or Trucking company, then it's not a $500 load. So if they give 25% back to let's say JB hunt, now the load is $375 and you will get 75% of that. If the load has been double brokered or there have been more hands in it perhaps that load now will only pay $300 or $250 to the trucking company that you are leased on to, and you still get 75% of that. So that same load if it's $250, your $75% of that is $187.50.

On top of that trucking companies are notorious for skimming money off of their owner operators that are leased on to them.

Intermodal Freight is famous for being crappy heavy cheap freight.

 

Sure, you'll need at least 5 to 10 yrs intermodal exp. (first as a driver, then as a dispatcher workign with brokers and railroads), get an SCAC code, get a relationship with brokers/forwarders who do intermodal(or develop your own logistics dept using people exp. in working with intermodal), spend a couple million to buy your own containers, then work out a deal with the railroads to ship them cross country, then spend a couple more million to place privately owned(and maintained) chassis in every city you plan to deal with. Wal-Mart, Schneider, SWIFT, Fedex do it. Oh, and you'll need at least $1 million in liability insurance to access the railroads.

You're asking billion dollar questions that apparently you have no experience with.

Anyone can ship general freight via intermodal, find a forwarder/broker that does it and have them broker the load. As far as owning your own containers and shipping freight, not going to happen without doing the above.

 

Actually, there's a lot of cross-docking in intermodal, but it's not happening in the middle of the country, it's happening on the coast, or withing a couple hundred miles, Wal-Mart, JB and others do most of it on the west coast and then ship it inland on 53's, and a lot of the dry van box freight loaded on the coasts is cross-docked. And that cross docking is done by large companies, or subsidiaries or large companies.

Most intermodal carriers started as two or three truck operations, I know two right now that are getting their feet wet, they might survive, might not, but they have to undercut to get the loads, and they are not breaking even, and then grow from there. Intermodal can be more cutthroat then regular trucking.


20', 40', 45' sea cans are used for domestic freight, it happens more often than you think, 99% of freight moved on MATSON containers is domestic, mainland US to Hawaii, Alaska or US Territories in the Pacific. There are a couple of lines that do stuff going to the Atlantic islands. A few of the other lines do some domestic shipping, but it's typically for repositioning of containers to meet demand, or it's otherwise specifically brokered. MAERSK and OOCL used to do a lot of domestic shipping, but in the last 10 yrs MAERSK has gone solely international, and OOCL only does it for repositioning.

 

How much revenue from intermodal did JBHT report?
How many trucks does JBHT use for intermodal operations?
Divide the first number by the second number and you will see their revenue per truck.
What are JBHT expenses for intermodal?
Subtract expenses per truck from revenue per truck to find profit per truck.
Why are you asking 3rd parties to explain JBHT? If I wanted to know Tom Brady's secret for NFL success I would ask Tom Brady, not commenters on ESPN's website.