This fireside chat recap is from Day 2 of FreightWaves’ The Future of Supply Chain live event being held in Rogers, Arkansas. For more information and content from the event, click here.
FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: How to leverage the latest innovations in real-time pricing for greater network resiliency.
DETAILS: The trucking market has seen major swings during the pandemic era. Access to real-time pricing allows market participants to better manage these swings.
SPEAKERS: Bill Driegert, co-founder and head of operations at Uber Freight, and Kevin Hill, head of communities and research at FreightWaves.
BIO: Driegert leads Uber’s logistics business. Prior to joining Uber, he served as chief operations officer at Pillow Homes. He also worked at Amazon as director of planning and innovation, with oversight over new initiatives in final-mile delivery and truckload. He was a founding team member of Coyote Logistics (acquired by UPS) and the company’s chief innovation officer.
KEY QUOTES FROM DRIEGERT
“We’re all familiar with the run-up we saw through COVID and the rate increases we saw through COVID. What we’ve seen since January is a bit of a correction. We’ve seen spot rates drop 30% since January.”
“For the last two years, we’ve seen this incredible increase in new carrier registrations, but for the most part, that was just displacement. These were drivers from fleets that were starting small carriers. So, we really weren’t seeing a net increase in capacity.”
“What we’re seeing since the beginning of this year [is different]. … We’ve seen 9,000 net new drivers just in February alone. So, we are now seeing a situation where we have overcapacity. The other thing driving this is that coming into this year you had carriers asking shippers for 30%, 50%, 100% rate increases and in some cases being able to lock in these very generous contract rates. As things started to soften, and as we started to have this excess capacity, a lot of this excess capacity is also new capacity — small carriers — and that puts incredible pressure on spot rates, which is just dropping rates through the floor.”