Peter Bradley is an award-winning career journalist with more than three decades of experience in both newspapers and national business magazines. His credentials include seven years as the transportation and supply chain editor at Purchasing Magazine and six years as the chief editor of Logistics Management.
Warehouse rental rates are poised for a significant increase due to a tightening of supply and an increase in global demand for space, according to one of the top two executives of the world's largest industrial property developer.
Walter C. Rakowich, co-chief executive of Prologis, Inc., told attendees at the annual International Warehouse Logistics Association (IWLA) conference earlier this week that an aging warehouse network will render a growing number of facilities obsolete and unusable. In addition, the growth of global trade will increase the need for distribution center space in both established and emerging markets, he added.
Keynoting the group's annual conference this week, Rakowich said market occupancies are rising, and the industry would need to add as much as 75 million square feet in warehousing capacity merely to replace obsolescent space.
"Customer sentiment is bullish, investors are driving up values, and rents are poised to grow," he said.
The specter of increasing rents should be balanced by the fact that rents fell substantially during the 2008-09 recession, according to Rakowich. He said current asset values are roughly 80 percent of their pre-recession peaks.
Obsolescence is driven by a variety of global factors, he said. For example, much of the warehousing space in fast-growing Asian economies was never configured for distribution, but for manufacturing.
"There's a tremendous opportunity for development," he said. He pointed to Canada and Brazil as nations that are ripe for development of DC space.
San Francisco-based Prologis, which last year completed a merger with AMB Property Corp., has $43 billion of assets under management and investments in 600 million square feet of distribution facilities in 22 countries across four continents. Prologis is "cautiously optimistic" about its prospects this year, Rakowich said.
According to Indiana-based Wabash, its TaaS offering differs from traditional leasing because it ensures minimal downtime by providing a holistic solution that supports the full lifecycle of the trailer, from acquisition to maintenance and uptime management.
In addition to its TaaS service, Wabash makes products including: dry freight and refrigerated trailers, flatbed trailers, tank trailers, dry and refrigerated truck bodies, structural composite panels and products, trailer aerodynamic solutions, and specialty food grade processing equipment.
In turn, California-based Kodiak will focus on further developments to “Kodiak Driver,” its autonomous technology. The company last month said it had surpassed 50,000 miles of autonomous long-haul trucking by working in collaborations with other companies such as supply chain solutions provider J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. and tire and sustainable mobility vendor Bridgestone Americas.
The supply chain visibility and execution software startup Gnosis Freight has gained new funding from private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, the firms said today.
The investment supports Gnosis’ mission to help logistics companies work together better across the entire ecosystem, the seven-year old, South Carolina-based firm said. Gnosis says its tech provides a smarter way to track and manage containers and to collaborate with logistics partners in a single location.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
But Texas-based Vista said the “strategic growth investment” was made by the firm’s Endeavor Fund, which provides growth capital and strategic support to market-leading, high-growth enterprise software, data and technology-enabled companies that have achieved at least $10 million in recurring revenue.
“Gnosis is pioneering digital connectivity between logistics partners at a critical and complex juncture of the global supply chain,” Rachel Arnold, Co-Head of Vista’s Endeavor Fund and Senior Managing Director, said in a release.
In other recent deals, Vista last month acquired another supply chain tech firm, Jaggaer, from its previous private equity owner, Cinven, for an undisclosed amount.
The Swiss logistics service provider Kuehne+Nagel has opened its largest-ever logistics hub, announcing today that it has launched operations in a 1.4-million square foot distribution center in Mantova, Northern Italy, for sporting goods retailer Adidas.
The distribution center will service a geographical range including 19 countries in Southern and Eastern Europe, using digital technologies that transform contract logistics management, making it faster, more accurate, and environmentally friendly.
Details of the specific technologies inside the building were not disclosed.
But Kuehne+Nagel said that automation in the DC includes more than 700 robots that support every step of the logistics process, from inventory tracking to product distribution. It is also equipped with 12 miles of conveyor belts and a shuttle system handling 25 storage lanes with a capacity of 440,000 units.
The facility also uses real-time monitoring to support improved efficiency and reduction in error margins, optimizing resources and reducing delivery times. Through the integration of data and predictive algorithms, Kuehne+Nagel can anticipate maximum demand moments and adapt workflows, the company said.
The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) says the bipartisan legislation—called the Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act—is needed because motor carriers are victimized through unpaid claims, unpaid loads, double brokered loads, or load phishing schemes on a daily basis.
The proposed act, which was introduced by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) and Congressman Mike Ezell (R-MS), offers a solution, OOIDA says. If passed, the bill would restore and codify FMCSA’s authority to issue civil penalties against bad actors. The legislation also requires that brokers, freight forwarders, and carriers provide a valid business address to FMCSA in order to register for authority.
According to Rep. Norton, the bill “would clarify that FMCSA has the authority to assess civil penalties for violations of commercial regulations, and crucially, to withhold registration from applicants failing to provide verification details demonstrating they intend to operate legitimate businesses. Americans moving across state lines need to be able to have confidence in FMCSA-licensed companies transporting their physical belongings. I'm thankful for Rep. Ezell’s partnership in co-leading this bill with me and look forward to the bill’s progress in the Senate.”
The bill has been endorsed by the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA), American Trucking Associations’ Moving & Storage Conference (ATA-MSC), Owner-Operator Independent Driver Association (OOIDA), the National Association of Small Trucking Companies (NASTC), Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance (CVSA), Institute for Safer Trucking (IST) and Road Safe America.
OOIDA is now calling for the bill to get a swift vote before the full U.S. House of Representatives.
"Freight fraud committed by criminals and scam artists has been devastating to many small business truckers simply trying to make a living in a tough freight market,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said in a release. “OOIDA and the 150,000 small-business truckers we represent applaud the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee for its bipartisan approach in providing FMCSA better tools to root out fraudulent actors, which are also harmful to consumers and highway safety. Because of the broad industry support for these commonsense reforms, we hope this legislation will move to the full House of Representatives for a vote without delay.”
A coalition of freight transport and cargo handling organizations is calling on countries to honor their existing resolutions to report the results of national container inspection programs, and for the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to publish those results.
Those two steps would help improve safety in the carriage of goods by sea, according to the Cargo Integrity Group (CIG), which is a is a partnership of industry associations seeking to raise awareness and greater uptake of the IMO/ILO/UNECE Code of Practice for Packing of Cargo Transport Units (2014) – often referred to as CTU Code.
According to the Cargo Integrity Group, member governments of the IMO adopted resolutions more than 20 years ago agreeing to conduct routine inspections of freight containers and the cargoes packed in them. But less than 5% of 167 national administrations covered by the agreement are regularly submitting the results of their inspections to IMO in publicly available form.
The low numbers of reports means that insufficient data is available for IMO or industry to draw reliable conclusions, fundamentally undermining their efforts to improve the safety and sustainability of shipments by sea, CIG said.
Meanwhile, the dangers posed by poorly packed, mis-handled, or mis-declared containerized shipments has been demonstrated again recently in a series of fires and explosions aboard container ships. Whilst the precise circumstances of those incidents remain under investigation, the Cargo Integrity Group says it is concerned that measures already in place to help identify possible weaknesses are not being fully implemented and that opportunities for improving compliance standards are being missed.