Top 50 Global Transportation Providers
Special Report
Armstrong & Associates’ Top 100 US third-party logistics provider( 3PL) rankings.
On a global level, C. H. Robinson was the 24th largest freight transportation provider of any kind by revenue last year, according to the Journal of Commerce Top 50 Global Transportation Providers rankings, prepared by SJ Consulting Group, which includes asset-based parcel and express carriers, container lines, and railroads, as well as 3PLs. With RXO, which was just outside the top 50 last year, their combined freight services revenue of $ 20.5 billion would have put C. H. Robinson at no. 20, just behind ocean carrier Hapag-Lloyd.
RXO also has technology, but the larger draw for C. H. Robinson is the chance to dive deeper into specialized services and to scale up its brokerage, adding density to its network that will drive efficiencies and, if all goes well, increase the company’ s profits.
The RXO purchase gives C. H. Robinson a“ jump start” in several areas, according to CFO Damon J. Lee.
“ They have a much larger expedited business than we do and expedited has been a strategic priority for us for the last... six to 12 months,” Lee told analysts during the announcement.“ We’ ll certainly reap the benefits of having both large brokers under one roof.”
Filling the gaps
Similar factors are driving acquisitions in logistics technology. Descartes Systems Group completed three deals in the third quarter, underscoring the importance of using purchases expand an ever-changing tech stack.
“ The logistics technology market, much like the logistics market itself, is highly fragmented, so we spend a lot of time trying to identify the best way to fill those gaps for customers,” Descartes CFO Ed Gardner said during the Journal of Commerce Inland26 Conference in Chicago.
When eyeing acquisition targets,“ one of the key things we’ re looking at is AI,” Gardner said.“[ But also ], is it a
Carriers will take delivery of 14 million TEUs of vessel capacity in the next three years. mariakray / Shutterstock. com business that requires deep domain expertise, solves a complex workflow, and / or has data that’ s hard to get?”
At the end of the day, however, logistics mergers and acquisitions— whether of brokers or technology firms— are about helping shippers move goods.
“ That could be a domestic e-commerce shipment or a white-glove refrigerator delivery or an international shipment that’ s touching five different countries and every single mode,” Gardner said.“ That’ s a complicated thing to do, so we need to have a lot of tools to do it.”
The need for“ a lot of tools” to create end-to-end solutions for customers has driven acquisitions for decades. Not all of them have worked out well— like Union Pacific Railroad’ s purchase of trucking company Overnite Transportation, a $ 1.2 billion deal in 1986. UP spun off Overnite in 2003.
But the quest to build agile networks that span modes and services is only gaining momentum in the AI era. It’ s evident not just on land but on the sea, in deals such as Hapag-Lloyd’ s planned $ 4.2 billion acquisition of Zim Integrated Shipping Services and the seemingly nonstop pace at which ocean carriers are acquiring marine terminals.
For C. H. Robinson, RXO helps it expand in the expedited and last-mile markets. RXO has its roots in the roll-up of last-mile logistics providers by serial companybuilder Bradley S. Jacobs and XPO Logistics, which spun off RXO as an independent company in 2022.
RXO itself made a $ 1.025 billion acquisition when it purchased Coyote Logistics from UPS in 2024, adding scale to its truckload brokerage and giving it the widely cited Curve Freight Market Forecast. Increasingly, logistics is a big fish-eats-smaller fish market.
“ We expect meaningful consolidation from the smalland medium-sized players.”
And some of the“ smaller” fish are big catches, too. For example, ocean carrier CMA CGM completed its $ 1.4 billion acquisition of FedEx Supply Chain last week, giving its CEVA Logistics subsidiary a bigger contract logistics platform in North America.
This past June, C. H. Robinson acquired DeSpir Logistics, a provider of secure transportation, cargo escort and temperature-controlled shipping services, for about $ 75 million in cash.
“ We expect meaningful consolidation in this industry from the small- and medium-sized players, and Robinson will be an outsized benefactor of that,” Lee said.
Even with“ meaningful consolidation” among larger providers, there will still be lots of fish in the logistics sea. The 96— now 95— companies in Armstrong & Associates Top 100 rankings had combined revenue of $ 113.4 billion last year.
email: bill. cassidy @ spglobal. com www. joc. com November 2, 2026 | Journal of Commerce 29