110-Year Old C.H. Robinson Bets on Acquisitions for Growth
Most of us assume we can get fresh blueberries in February, buy brightly colored flowers for Mother’s Day or find fully stocked shelves at department stores in the midst of a snowstorm.
C.H. Robinson Worldwide Inc. helps make it happen.
The Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based global logistics firm matches manufacturers, retailers, grocers and a host of other companies with cargo carriers to find the best way to move goods from point A to point B — whether by land, air or sea.
By combining its proprietary online tracking system with old-school person-to-person sales skills, the $13.5 billion company has become one of the world’s top third-party freight-moving companies, working with nearly every Fortune 500 company in America and most of Minnesota’s best-known brands.
C.H. Robinson ranks No. 6 on the Transport Topics Top 50 list of the largest logistics companies in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Since going public in 1997, the 110-year-old company has plodded along with mostly measured and organic growth. But Robinson has sunk more than $1 billion into acquisitions since 2010, with two of its largest deals coming in the past three years.
The broader freight-moving industry has been on a buying jag as well, taking advantage of low capital costs and interest rates. Longtime CEO John Wiehoff said Robinson is more interested in making strategic plays for companies that will beef up its international footprint or enhance its technology.
“A number of companies in our industry have been way more aggressive with acquisitions, buying anything you can,” Wiehoff said. “We’ve been much more deliberate and thoughtful, with great sensitivity to cultural fit and a successful integration.”
C.H. Robinson already is reaping benefits from its most recent deals. Its $635 million purchase of Chicago-based Phoenix International in 2013 doubled the company’s global ocean-and-air freight forwarding business, expanding its toehold onto the world’s largest and most coveted trade lane between China and North America.
Last year’s acquisition of Freightquote.com, an e-commerce company based in St. Louis, further fortified Robinson’s dominance as North America’s largest manager of truckload shipments. Freightquote.com, with a healthy client roster of small companies, helped boost Robinson’s less-than-truckload orders by nearly a third in 2015, according to Morningstar analyst Matt Young.
“Their execution has been top-notch,” Young said. “They historically have not been a very acquisitive company. Those they’ve done have been very targeted and smart, often to get them more scale in market that’s growing.”
Charles Henry Robinson founded the company in Grand Forks, N.D., in 1905, transporting and distributing perishable fruits and vegetables by horse and buggy. Although he died four years later, his namesake company survived and began a period of rapid growth in the 1980s after federal deregulation of the trucking industry.
To accommodate its expanding workforce, the company built a four-building campus seven years ago near the Flying Cloud Airport, where eagles soar over the Minnesota River and Valleyfair roller coasters loom over the horizon.
The company doesn’t own fleets of trucks or a lot of other assets. It makes money by brokering deals between manufacturers and transit companies, an industry that remains highly fragmented. Robinson considers this strategy a competitive advantage that keeps costs low and provides more flexibility.
Scale is key, because it gives companies like Robinson a stronger negotiating position. Eighty-three% of Robinson’s trucking shipments last year involved companies with fewer than 100 trucks. But having multiple shipping options along similar routes is just as essential, providing its sales force more alternatives if cargo gets stymied over such uncontrollable events as weather, political strife or a labor strike at a key shipping port.
While the company operates in 38 countries, 80% of Robinson’s business comes from moving freight around the U.S. and Canada, where it is the market leader by a long shot.
“The organic growth story is still there for market share in the truck brokerage business,” Young said. “The industry is highly fragmented, so there’s a lot of opportunities for a company like Robinson, which has benefits of a network effect, where the more carriers and more shippers in your network, the more valuable it becomes.”
