Drilling Deep: The LTL model adapts to the COVID-19 world

· Thursday, June 25, 2020

The less-than-truckload (LTL) sector of the trucking sector is generally more stable than the truckload carriers it shares the road with. But that doesn’t mean it has faced the pandemic without major upheaval.

On this week’s Drilling Deep podcast, host John Kingston speaks with Brian Thompson, the chief commercial officer of SMC3. His company sets the base rates for LTL shipments and he has a special insight into how the sector is faring.

LTL’s primary base of business from industry is being squeezed, but growing last-mile deliveries of all sorts of products is offsetting some of that financial pain. Thompson discusses it on this week’s podcast.

John Kingston

John has an almost 50-year career as a journalist, most of them covering commodities and markets. The largest part of his career was spent at Platts, now part of S&P Global Energy. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment. He was awarded the 2020 Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah International Energy Award for Lifetime Achievement for the Advancement of International Energy Journalism.