If you’ve bought a refrigerator or patio equipment online, most likely it was delivered to your home by XPO Logistics, a fast-growing trucking and logistics company that specializes in delivering big, bulky items ordered online. And business has been booming ever since Bradley Jacobs became CEO in 2011 and built XPO from a struggling trucking company into a mega transportation enterprise.
The Connecticut-based company more than doubled revenues in 2016 to $15 billion, vaulting it to number 191 on the Fortune 500 list of America’s largest companies. Investors have also discovered XPO. The stock, trading on the New York Stock Exchange, has nearly tripled in the past two years.
Jacobs tells Fortune’s Susie Gharib that XPO’s explosive growth is thanks to the online retailing boom. “E-commerce is definitely hot. And it’s definitely not a fad that’s going away,” says Jacobs. “The penetration rate is getting higher and higher and people are shopping more online than going to brick and mortar stores, and I think that’s going to continue for quite a number of years.”
Also driving growth at XPO is Jacobs’ emphasis on innovations that increase speedy deliveries. XPO’s technology spending bill is nearly $500 million a year. Jacobs describes XPO’s warehouse operations as “high-tech hubs” with robots and drones. “We’re at the cutting edge of automation,” he says, “in all sectors of what we do.”