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Can you confirm that Flexport's gross revenue for 2022 hit $5B?
Jan-Erik Asplund
Co-Founder at Sacra
The $5B gross revenue figure for 2022 (up 51.52% from 2021) we put in our Flexport report is an estimate based on Flexport’s CEO Ryan Petersen estimating the company would hit $5B in gross revenue at the end of 2022 in a tweet.
That $5B revenue figure has been cited by trade publications in logistics, including Freightwaves, American Journal of Transportation, as well as Reuters.
To check on how that projection would have held, we looked at how Flexport’s 51.52% year-over-year growth would have compared to what we saw from other freight forwarders and 3PLs in 2022.
We added a sheet to our Flexport dataset consisting of revenue history and growth data for the last several years for 36 of the top third-party logistics providers in the world. Check out that sheet here.
According to our look at the comps, Flexport growing 52% YoY to $5B gross revenue in 2022 puts it in the range we’d expect given the performance of other freight forwarders/3PLs in 2022.
$5B in revenue in 2022 reflects a 67% slowdown in Flexport’s growth rate from 2020-1. That’s comparable to the 62% average dropoff in 2022 growth that we saw across the other freight forwarders.
Flexport’s 52% YoY growth rate would still be among the top 2022 growth numbers for freight forwarders—comparable to 50% for Ryder, 32% for Mainfreight, 47% for Maersk—but that’s not inconsistent given that Flexport previously grew faster than the vast majority of big freight forwarders across both 2020 (94% YoY vs. the average of 7.84%) and 2021 (154% YoY vs. the average of 43%).
