Name: Fortune 500: Why XPO Logistics Is the Fastest Growing Company on the Fortune 500
Uploaded: 2017-07-06
Duration: 4 min 51 s
Description: XPO Logistics CEO Brad Jacobs explains how the company doubled its revenues.

Brad, it looks like XPO logistics is really on a roll. Here's a company that just started a few years ago, and now it's the fastest growing company on the newest list of the Fortune 500. You doubled the revenues, the stock is hitting new highs, you've got strong earnings, where's all this growth coming from? Number one, we're in a great industry. We're in an industry that's growing on it's own. Number two, we've achieved leadership positions in some of the fastest growing subsectors of transportation and logistics. Number three, we've got a great team, I mean an amazing team. It took me years to build up this team. And it's just phenomenal. And the ability to execute with precision and to meet or exceed budget every quarter after quarter. And to exceed customer's expectations. Keep the focus on pleasing the customer is really special. You know everybody talks about the Amazon effect. Customers buying things online, they want them delivered right away, and we know that FedEx has benefitted from that so has UPS. How about for XPO? We're actually the largest manager of expedited shipments in the world. So these are critical, urgent, unplanned Shipments that have to be delivered right away, usually have to be picked up within 45 minutes and delivered within a couple of hours. And we usually do that by truck. But we also do it by plane, we also do it cross transcontinental and we do a lot of cross border to Mexico on that. That's a big specialty of ours. Mm hm, and this whole e- commerce has been a game changer for the retail industry. How critical Is that trend for the future of XPO? E- commerce is definitely hot, and it's definitely not a fad that's going away, in our opinion. The penetration rate is getting higher and higher, and people are shopping more online than going to bricks and mortar stores. And I think that's gonna continue for quite a number of years. And having said that, we're agile, we're flexible, we're adaptable. We move with the markets. We listen to our customers very closely. And we do what they want. We provide the services that they need. If, for some reason, it changed from e- commerce to a new technology years from now, we'll innovate and we'll go with that. Brad, at XPO Logistics, you spend almost $ 500 million a year On technology. And you don't think of trucking companies as being high tech companies. What's all that technology spending going for? So if you got to any of our 750 warehouses, they are more and more turning into high tech hubs. Where you have robots, you have drones doing the inventory, you have goggles to do the guiding the pick and pack. It's more and more automation, we just At the cutting edge of automation in all sectors of what we do particularly in the warehousing part .?? What about Amazon and Uber, we're hearing that they're getting into this freight business, how do you feel about that? Well Uber is in the freight brokerage business, which is one of our business lines. They're not very big yet, but we expect them to get big over time. It's a great company, and they've done it very well with the other moves. Amazon has not yet gotten into truck brokerage, although they plan to, eventually. But like most of our big retail and e- tail customers, most of them outsource some of their transportation logistics. And they also do some of it themselves. So Amazon is perfectly within its rights to do somethings they do well and to outsource things that aren't their bread and butter. You know, when you hear that Amazon is moving into a new market, you think either domination or disruption. How do you feel about that? I don't feel they're going to dominate or disrupt us. I think they're a great customer, a growing customer, a demanding customer, that wants to please their customers, and if you're a vendor who can help Amazon please and delight their customers, they're a great partner. You know, you've done a lot of acquisitions as you've been building XPO Logistics. Do you see that in the future, you might be buying a Edgy tech company from Silicon Valley that's going to help you compete with power houses like Amazon. That's not likely Suzy, because we have 1, 600 fulltime IT professionals on staff. And we're spending hundreds and millions of dollars a year in innovation technology so We spend more money and have more resources that a lot of those startups do, so. And we have user generated content from our own employees and from our own customers. So we have our secret sauce. How do you come up with your innovations? Through asking our own employees and through asking our customers. What's your fantasy technology, what's your dream technology? Forget about whether it's practical, or whether it exists, whether it's affordable, what would be perfect? What would success look like for the perfect technology? And we listen to all of those very, very closely, and we solicit them, we have lots and lot of feedback on that. And then we pursue the ones that make the most amount of sense. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Fortune 500: Why XPO Logistics Is the Fastest Growing Company on the Fortune 500

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XPO Logistics CEO Brad Jacobs explains how the company doubled its revenues. 