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Sluggish outlook prevails, freight leaders say

Tough market conditions will persist in 2024, but a return to more stable economic growth may boost the long-term freight outlook, trucking industry experts gathered for SMC3 conference said.

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Victoria Kickham
By Victoria KickhamJan 25, 2024
Victoria Kickham
Victoria Kickham, an editor at large for Supply Chain Quarterly, started her career as a newspaper reporter in the Boston area before moving into B2B journalism. She has covered manufacturing, distribution and supply chain issues for a variety of publications in the industrial and electronics sectors, and now writes about everything from forklift batteries to omnichannel business trends for Supply Chain Quarterly's sister publication, DC Velocity.
See Full Bio

Volatile freight market conditions will persist this year, but a return to normalcy may be on the horizon, according to experts gathered for SMC3 JumpStart, a less-than-truckload (LTL)-focused supply chain event held in Atlanta this week.

More than 600 people turned out for the three-day conference, which brings together carriers, shippers, logistics services providers, and technology companies from across trucking and logistics markets.

“Good riddance to 2023,” Dave Bozeman, president and CEO of global logistics company C.H. Robinson, said during a presentation on the opening day of the event, adding that he expects some of last year’s challenges to hang around, with no “meaningful” uptick before the second half of 2024.

Bozeman’s comments echoed those of other industry experts, including economists Jeff Rosensweig and Keith Prather, who talked about the implications of global and domestic economic trends on the trucking and logistics industry in the year ahead. Both pointed to a return to more stable, although lower, pre-pandemic GDP growth  over the next few years and said easing inflation, as well as resilient consumer and construction markets, will help improve the longer term outlook.

Prather, managing director of Armada Corporate Intelligence, said the long-awaited for “reset” has arrived, in which the overall economy and the transportation economy will come back in line following two years of macro-economic resiliency alongside recessionary conditions in freight.

“This is the big reset we’ve been waiting for,” Prather said, adding that he expects North American freight volume to accelerate in the second half of the year and into 2025. “Things are different moving forward.”

Prather and others also said that global supply chain congestion is likely to be the biggest challenge facing the industry in the months ahead, given ongoing tension and violence in the Red Sea and ramifications from drought conditions in the Panama Canal, as just two examples.

“Global supply chain congestion and difficulty planning for demand will be the real challenge moving forward,” he told attendees. “This is where the winners will get it right.”

SMC3 will meet next in June for its 2024 Connections conference, scheduled for June 24-26 in Colorado Springs.
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