Analyst Note
| Matthew Young, CFA |Wide-moat global forwarder Expeditors International’s third-quarter gross revenue increased 19% year over year, once again driven by robust airfreight rates (especially out of North Asia), which have spiked on unusually constrained capacity (limited belly space availability among commercial airlines). We suspect pricing on ocean freight also contributed. Airfreight tonnage contracted 5% year over year (versus a 10% decline in the second quarter), while ocean freight activity fell 5% (down 14% last quarter), but demand showed solid signs of sequential recovery off pandemic lows.