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▲ 3 r/FreightBrokers

Catch up on what happened this week in Logistics: May 12-18

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Supreme Court just ended freight brokerage's free pass

Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.

The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.

That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.

So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.

The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.

And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.

What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.

UniUni is heading for a public market debut

Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.

This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.

According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.

The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.

UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.

There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.

But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.

Trucks are the new ships

We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.

The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.

Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.

Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.

A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.

Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.

It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.

The tariff refunds are actually showing up

Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.

Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.

Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.

CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.

The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.

If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.

M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.

PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.

ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.

INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.

INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

reddit.com
u/charlesholmes1 — 3 days ago
▲ 2 r/SPILogistics

Catch up on what happened this week in Logistics: May 12-18

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Supreme Court just ended freight brokerage's free pass

Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.

The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.

That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.

So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.

The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.

And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.

What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.

UniUni is heading for a public market debut

Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.

This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.

According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.

The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.

UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.

There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.

But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.

Trucks are the new ships

We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.

The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.

Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.

Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.

A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.

Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.

It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.

The tariff refunds are actually showing up

Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.

Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.

Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.

CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.

The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.

If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.

M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.

PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.

ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.

INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.

INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

reddit.com
u/charlesholmes1 — 3 days ago
▲ 1 r/Warehousing

Catch up on what happened this week in Logistics: May 12-18

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Supreme Court just ended freight brokerage's free pass

Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.

The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.

That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.

So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.

The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.

And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.

What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.

UniUni is heading for a public market debut

Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.

This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.

According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.

The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.

UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.

There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.

But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.

Trucks are the new ships

We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.

The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.

Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.

Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.

A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.

Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.

It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.

The tariff refunds are actually showing up

Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.

Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.

Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.

CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.

The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.

If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.

M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.

PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.

ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.

INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.

INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

reddit.com
u/charlesholmes1 — 3 days ago
▲ 15 r/Warehouseworkers

Catch up on what happened this week in Logistics: May 12-18

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Supreme Court just ended freight brokerage's free pass

Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.

The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.

That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.

So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.

The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.

And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.

What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.

UniUni is heading for a public market debut

Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.

This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.

According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.

The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.

UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.

There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.

But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.

Trucks are the new ships

We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.

The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.

Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.

Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.

A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.

Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.

It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.

The tariff refunds are actually showing up

Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.

Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.

Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.

CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.

The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.

If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.

M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.

PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.

ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.

INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.

INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

reddit.com
u/charlesholmes1 — 3 days ago
▲ 3 r/3PL

Catch up on what happened this week in Logistics: May 12-18

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Supreme Court just ended freight brokerage's free pass

Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.

The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.

That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.

So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.

The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.

And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.

What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.

UniUni is heading for a public market debut

Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.

This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.

According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.

The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.

UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.

There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.

But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.

Trucks are the new ships

We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.

The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.

Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.

Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.

A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.

Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.

It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.

The tariff refunds are actually showing up

Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.

Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.

Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.

CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.

The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.

If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.

M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.

PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.

ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.

INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.

INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.

That's all for this week. If you found this useful, consider subscribing.
(Your data will not be shared. Subscribers' data is strictly for sending out the weekly newsletter.)

reddit.com
u/charlesholmes1 — 3 days ago
▲ 24 r/logistics

Catch up on what happened this week in Logistics: May 12-18

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Supreme Court just ended freight brokerage's free pass

Freight brokers used to have a legal shield that made it almost impossible to sue them when a carrier they hired caused an accident. The Supreme Court just took that shield away. Unanimously.

The case goes like this. A guy named Shawn Montgomery lost his leg when a truck hauling plastic pots veered off the road in Illinois. C.H. Robinson was the freight broker that booked the carrier. Montgomery tried to sue Robinson for hiring a dangerous carrier. C.H. Robinson's defense was essentially: federal law protects us from these kinds of lawsuits. A lower court agreed. The Supreme Court said no, actually, it doesn't.

That defense, which brokers across the industry have leaned on for years, is now gone.

So what changes? Brokers can now be sued in any state if they hired a carrier that had obvious red flags and something went wrong. The legal standard isn't that brokers have to guarantee nothing bad ever happens. It's just that they have to do their homework before booking a carrier. Check their safety record. Look them up. If a carrier had a terrible track record and you booked them anyway and someone got hurt, you're going to have a hard time explaining that to a jury.

The scary part is how much information is freely available. FMCSA's safety database is public and free. Crash rates, inspection history, out-of-service records, all of it is right there. Plaintiff attorneys have known this for years and have been building cases in anticipation of exactly this ruling. Those cases are getting filed soon.

And it's not just brokers. The court wrote about brokers because that's who the case was about, but the same logic applies to 3PLs, freight forwarders, and anyone else who selects carriers as part of their business.

What this means for you: If you broker freight or select carriers on behalf of clients, you need a documented process for vetting them. Not a mental checklist. An actual written process with records you can pull up later. If your current approach is basically "they have a valid license and a truck," that's not going to cut it anymore. Call your insurance broker, too, and ask whether your current coverage would actually respond to this kind of claim, because many policies weren't written with this exposure in mind.

UniUni is heading for a public market debut

Four weeks ago, we covered the Canadian 3PL expansion story in Edition 41: GXO opening in Mississauga, Arvato acquiring Think Logistics, IMC, and DP World planting flags north of the border. The thesis was that Canada's 3PL market, projected to nearly double to $49.7 billion by 2033, was finally ready for its moment.

This week, the biggest Canadian last-mile story yet: UniUni, the Richmond, BC-based delivery company, is reportedly planning to go public via a SPAC merger.

According to The Globe and Mail, the deal would merge UniUni with MAK Acquisition, a TSX-listed SPAC led by former Dye & Durham CEO Matthew Proud, valuing the combined entity at over $1 billion USD. UniUni is also raising $100 million in a PIPE alongside the deal. MAK confirmed it's in discussions but hasn't signed anything.

The numbers in the confidential memo obtained by The Globe and Mail are striking. Revenue grew from $113 million in 2023 to $295 million in 2024, then to $683 million in 2025. The company expects $1.1 billion this year and $1.5 billion in 2027. They lost $70 million in 2025 but expect profitability this year and $125 million in pre-tax profit in 2027.

UniUni runs a gig-powered delivery model, with 100,000 registered drivers delivering 1.2 million packages per day. Its primary customers are Shein and Temu. The company raised $85 million just two months ago from Beijing-based Rockets Capital and RBC, bringing total funding to $285 million.

There are some things worth watching carefully here. Uni's labor practices have drawn scrutiny, including multiple proposed class-action lawsuits. Media reports last year surfaced sordid conditions at a Connecticut warehouse. A company going public with that kind of background will face a different level of examination than a private operator.

But the growth trajectory is hard to argue with. And the timing, landing right as the Canada 3PL market is heating up and as Shein and Temu continue scaling North American operations, isn't an accident.

Trucks are the new ships

We've been tracking the Gulf crisis since the Strait of Hormuz closed, and one of the stories nobody expected to write is this: the global economy is partly being held together by 3,500 trucks running around the clock across the Arabian desert.

The Hormuz closure forced a rapid rerouting of trade. Shipping lanes built around a single chokepoint suddenly became unusable. What happened next was improvised on a scale that's genuinely hard to process.

Saudi Arabia's state-controlled mining company, Maaden, which exports phosphate fertilizer to global markets, had its entire supply chain misdirected. Its CEO, Bob Wilt, dispatched executives to Red Sea ports within days of the conflict starting. Two weeks later, he had rail and truck operators lined up. Six hundred trucks became 1,600, became 2,000, became 3,500. Each truck runs with two drivers to keep moving around the clock.

Wilt said Maaden will have caught up on its export backlog by the end of May. The cargo is already reaching Djibouti, Thailand, and Argentina via the Red Sea port of Yanbu.

And Maaden isn't the only one. MSC and Maersk are trucking goods across the Arabian Peninsula. Etihad Rail Freight moved hundreds of Nissans by train from Fujairah to Abu Dhabi, the country's first vehicle transport by rail. The UAE's port of Khor Fakkan saw truck traffic explode from 100 a day to 7,000. Weekly container traffic at the port went from 2,000 to 50,000. The operator, Gulftainer, hired 900 people in two weeks.

A UAE supermarket chain dispatched trucks loaded with British snacks on a 16-day journey from Kent through Western Europe, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia to Dubai. This is the kind of supply chain improvisation that doesn't fit in a playbook.

Trucking routes can't match the capacity of ocean shipping or compete on cost. And they don't fix the energy crunch. But they've become a meaningful shock absorber in key markets, sustaining trade flows that would otherwise have collapsed.

It's also worth reading alongside the Mexico corridor story from a few weeks ago. Whether it's Mexico's Interoceanic Corridor, the Arabian desert routes, or LNG tankers taking the long way around, the same pattern keeps showing up: when a single-point bottleneck breaks, geography and improvisation fill the gap faster than anyone predicted. The traders who are ahead of it are the ones who already had contingency options mapped.

The tariff refunds are actually showing up

Back in Edition 42, we told you the CAPE portal was going live on April 20 and that the government was sitting on up to $175 billion in tariff refunds from duties the Supreme Court struck down in February. We told you to get your clients moving.

Here's the update: the refunds are coming. Faster than expected.

Customs began accepting refund claims on April 20 and said payments would start hitting accounts around May 11. That timeline held. As of last Friday, at least one importer had money in their account. Others received approval notices indicating payments would follow within days.

CMCBrands, a St. Louis apparel company, received notice that its first claim for roughly $42,000 had been approved. Their CEO said she was shocked by how fast it happened. A small wine importer, one of the lead plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case, expects to receive $100,000 and plans to use most of it to pay off suppliers. An art supply company in Washington plans to use part of its $18,000 refund to pay down a credit line and fund new product development. A California-based flowerpot importer expecting $150,000 is planning a sourcing trip to Vietnam.

The catch: about 63% of shipments subject to the tariffs are eligible in this first phase. The rest could take until 2027 to process. And the refund process is not automatic. You have to opt in, file the right paperwork, and wait. Some importers are still running into errors on the portal.

If your clients haven't filed yet, get them moving. Make sure their customs paperwork is clean before they submit, because errors will slow everything down. And if you want an intro to someone who can file the paperwork and offer upfront cash while they wait, reply to this email.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE ‘Amazon Now’, a 30-minute delivery service for groceries and household essentials, is now live in Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, and Seattle, with rapid expansion planned through the rest of the year. Prime members pay $3.99 per delivery. This isn't a shot at FedEx or UPS. It's Amazon planting a flag directly in Uber, DoorDash, and Instacart territory, going after the "I need it now" consumer who's been the whole bet for gig-economy delivery platforms.

M&A Fulfillment Crowd, the UK-based tech-led 3PL backed by Palatine private equity, acquired Fulfilment.nl, a Dutch e-commerce logistics specialist. Fulfilment.nl will operate independently within the group under its existing management team. The Netherlands is a critical European logistics hub, and for fulfilmentcrowd, this is a direct play at cross-border EU volume. The mid-market 3PL consolidation story isn't only happening in North America.

PARTNERSHIPS Instacart added Ace Hardware to its same-day delivery platform, with delivery in as fast as one hour from thousands of locations nationwide. We covered Instacart's acquisition of Instaleap in Edition 42, which was about accelerating international retail partnerships. This is the domestic version of the same strategy: turning Instacart from a grocery app into a local retail delivery layer. The platform now works with more than 2,200 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America. The pace of category expansion is not slowing down.

ENFORCEMENT A California aluminum company, Perfectus Aluminum Inc., agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations it evaded antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese aluminum extrusions. The company imported millions of aluminum extrusions, spot-welded them into "pallets" to misrepresent them as finished merchandise not subject to duties, then imported over 2.2 million of them between 2011 and 2014. A jury convicted the company in 2021. The settlement resolves the civil case. $549.5 million is not a slap on the wrist. With the Trade Fraud Task Force operating at full speed, duty evasion is a much riskier calculation than it was five years ago.

INFRASTRUCTURE CH Robinson's Robinson Fresh division opened a 142,600 square-foot facility in Pharr, Texas, just miles from the US-Mexico border near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. The facility has 69 dock doors, multiple temperature zones, and is designed specifically for fresh produce cross-border supply chains. 55% of all fresh produce imported from Mexico enters through Texas. As we've covered, Mexico's role in US supply chains is only getting more entrenched, not less, regardless of what happens in the courts on tariffs. Fresh produce was always going to need infrastructure that matches the volume.

INFRASTRUCTURE Dollar Tree opened a 1 million-square-foot distribution center in Litchfield Park, Arizona, which will serve about 700 stores across the West and Southwest starting next month. A second DC in Marietta, Oklahoma, is scheduled to open in 2027, replacing the facility destroyed by a tornado in 2024. The Arizona opening is part of a deliberate push to reduce transit miles and get product closer to stores. When a retailer whose entire brand promise is price talks about investing in speed, it's usually because transportation costs are eating into margins.

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u/charlesholmes1 — 3 days ago
▲ 18 r/3PL+5 crossposts

Hey everyone,

If it's your first time reading one of my posts, I break down the top logistics news from the past week, so you're always up to date.

Let's jump into it,

The Gulf shock is now a consumer problem. That makes it your problem.

U.S. retail sales jumped 1.7% in March, the fastest monthly pace in over three years. Sounds great until you look at what drove it. Gas station sales were up 15.5% month-over-month. Strip out gas, and retail growth was actually 0.6%, slightly below February.

Inflation came in at 0.9% for March, triple the February rate. Gas prices have risen more than $1 per gallon on average since the war began. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil passes, has been effectively closed since the conflict started.

Consumers have been able to absorb the inflated gas prices thanks to tax refunds, savings, and pay gains, which are cushioning the blow. But none of those are endless. Savings get depleted. Refunds run out. If the war stretches toward the end of the year, consumers and the economy get into real trouble.

The University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index ended April at 49.8, a record low. Below the financial crisis. Below COVID. Below the post-Ukraine inflation spike. A two-week ceasefire gave the number a slight bounce above the 48.5 economists expected, but sentiment still fell 6.6% from last month and 4.6% from a year ago. Year-ahead inflation expectations jumped to 4.7% in April from 3.8% in March, the largest one-month increase since Trump's tariff shock a year ago. Long-term expectations hit 3.5%, the highest since last October.

No diplomatic breakthrough will fix this overnight. Gulf export hubs would take months to return to normal, and as this continues, months will turn into years. The reality is that until energy prices are lowered, consumer sentiment will remain unchanged.

What this means for you: Many of you are fulfilling orders for what we call “discretionary spending,” and when consumer sentiment is low, we experience a big pullback, which is already visible in the March data. Softer demand is coming, and that’s scary for a lot of you. The longer the war goes on, the more the consumer cushion erodes, eventually showing up as reduced shipping volume across the board. It’s important to speak with your brands closer to Q3 and Q4 and figure out what the real expected volume will be this year, rather than basing it on last year, to prevent overstaffing and shrinking the already small margins.

The FTC just freed 18,000 workers from noncompetes.

The FTC ordered Rollins, the parent company of Orkin, HomeTeam, and Critter Control, to stop enforcing noncompete agreements against more than 18,000 employees nationwide. The company had been requiring nearly all its workers, including pest-control technicians and customer service reps earning relatively low wages, to sign two-year noncompetes prohibiting them from working in the industry within a 75-mile radius of any of Rollins' 700-plus U.S. locations.

The FTC's complaint alleges Rollins sent hundreds of cease-and-desist letters to former employees and filed multiple lawsuits against workers who left. Workers had no ability to negotiate, received no extra compensation for signing, and were given little time to understand what they were agreeing to. The FTC also sent warning letters to 13 other pest-control companies, flagging similar concerns.

The enforcement trend is clear and has been building throughout the Trump-Vance FTC's tenure, following similar actions against a pet cremation company and a building services contractor, as well as warning letters to healthcare employers. The FTC's Joint Labor Task Force isn't slowing down.

Now apply this to your business. Noncompetes are standard practice at 3PLs, particularly for sales reps, account managers, and operations leads. Sales reps are where this gets especially interesting. Companies often feel most entitled to restrict them because they carry customer relationships, pricing knowledge, and lane data. Courts have historically been more sympathetic to noncompetes for salespeople than for frontline workers. But the FTC's current posture doesn't carve out salespeople as a protected category. It looks at whether the restriction is narrowly tailored and proportionate to a legitimate business interest. A blanket two-year, wide-radius noncompete on every sales rep, regardless of seniority or what they actually had access to, is exactly the profile the FTC is targeting.

If you want to protect your customer relationships and proprietary information, there are better tools. Non-solicitation agreements, which prevent a departing rep from poaching specific accounts they personally worked, tend to survive scrutiny. NDAs covering actual proprietary data, like pricing models or customer contracts, hold up. Garden leave clauses, where you pay the person during the restricted period, are viewed far more favorably than unpaid restrictions.

What this means for you: Get your employment agreements in front of counsel before a complaint does it for you. The FTC's posture is that broad noncompetes on workers who had no real negotiating power are presumptively problematic. That description fits many 3PL sales and ops hires. The question isn't whether this trend is coming for your industry. It's whether you're ahead of it or behind it.

UPS made barcode scanning obsolete across its entire U.S. network

UPS has deployed RFID sensing across its entire U.S. small package network, replacing traditional barcode scanning as the primary method of package tracking.

The operational shift is bigger than it sounds. The old model required workers to physically scan each package at every transition point: pickup, hub intake, loading, unloading, and delivery. RFID flips that entirely. Parcels are now automatically detected as they move through sensor-equipped vehicles, loading bays, and hubs, with no manual scan required.

What this actually changes: fewer blind spots at handoff points, earlier detection of misloads and misrouted packages, and more consistent tracking data across the network. Instead of discovering a misrouted package at delivery, the system flags it before it gets on the wrong truck.

For shippers and enterprise customers, the effect shows up in tracking reliability. More consistent scan events mean fewer gaps in tracking updates, fewer "where's my package" service contacts, and better on-time delivery performance.

What this means for you: If you have clients comparing carrier options based on reliability, UPS just raised the bar for network visibility. FedEx and regional carriers will face questions about when they'll make a comparable move. And if you're running a 3PL operation, expect shipper expectations around tracking granularity to keep climbing.

QUICK HITS

LAST MILE Sam's Club launched one-hour delivery. Sam's Club introduced a new Express delivery tier targeting one-hour delivery windows. The average Express order is placed, shopped, and delivered in 55 minutes, with some deliveries made in under 10 minutes. Walmart reported sub-three-hour delivery usage grew over 60% year-over-year in Q4. Amazon and FedEx have both announced recent expansions of their quick-delivery services. The race to own the sub-one-hour slot is now a four-way competition, and it's accelerating fast.

M&A Descartes acquires Idelic for up to $40M. Descartes Systems Group picked up Idelic, an AI-powered driver safety and performance management platform built on 40 billion miles of telemetry data and over 400,000 accident records. The acquisition adds predictive accident modeling and driver risk scoring to Descartes' routing and fleet management stack. Up-front consideration was $28 million, with up to $12 million in performance-based earn-out over the next two years. For fleet operators on Descartes' platform, expect driver safety intelligence to start showing up in your operational data.

M&A AIP acquires Honeywell's Warehouse and Workflow Solutions business. American Industrial Partners signed a definitive agreement to acquire WWS, Honeywell's warehouse automation unit built on the Intelligrated and Transnorm platforms. The business generated approximately $935 million in revenue in 2025 and employs more than 3,300 people. AIP already owns Trew, a U.S.-based automated material handling integrator, so this is a consolidation play in warehouse automation. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026.

SHIPPING China launched its first fully electric containerships. The Ning Yuan Dian Kun, a 740 TEU vessel designed for coastal routes between Ningbo-Zhoushan and Jiaxing, entered service on April 15 after months of testing. Built by China State Shipbuilding, the ship has approximately 19,600 kWh of battery capacity and reduces CO2 emissions by roughly 1,462 tonnes per year compared with conventional vessels. It also features fully autonomous navigation. Its sister ship heads to sea trials next month, with delivery expected in June. China is also building out a parallel, swappable-battery network for inland shipping on the Yangtze River. The electric container segment just got its first real-world proof of concept.

ELECTRIC TRUCKS Tesla Semi mass production is happening this year. Tesla confirmed in its Q1 earnings report that mass production of the Semi begins in 2026, with serial production builds starting in the first half and a substantial ramp in the second half. The Nevada facility is designed for up to 50,000 trucks annually. The first public Megacharging site is already live in Southern California, and Tesla has mapped out roughly 46 public stations targeting completion by 2027, with Texas (19 sites) and California (17 sites) leading the rollout.

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u/charlesholmes1 — 24 days ago