Transportation Deals: RoadLink plans to acquire C-Trucks

Deal will give intermodal trucking and logistics provider and bigger footprint, more flexibility on both sides of the border

Jeff Berman, Group News Editor -- Logistics Management, 6/26/2008

ATLANTA—Intermodal trucking and logistics services provider RoadLink said earlier today it has agreed to acquire CP Ships Trucking Ltd.—or C-Truck—a subsidiary of ocean carrier Hapag-Lloyd.

RoadLink said that when this deal is completed it will roll out an alliance with Fastfrate, a Canadian concern comprised of Consolidated Fastfrate, Canada Drayage Inc., and Koch Transport. Fastfrate transports more than 2 billion pounds of freight annually and offers point-to-point less-than-truckload and truckload haulage within Canada and the Northwest and Midwest United States, as well as national drayage and cartage, warehousing, and east coast and west coast transloading, among others.  

RoadLink said in a statement that this alliance will focus on operating selected locations and enhancing service capabilities to provide shippers with “single point of contact solutions to complex transportation and warehousing challenges.” Both RoadLink and Fastfrate are subsidiaries of Fenway Partners, a New York-based private equity firm

“This [alliance] ties nicely back into our unfolding strategy, and the name of the game is to build out our North American footprint in which we cover all of North America, focus on intermodal logistics, and integrate the companies (C-Truck into RoadLink) into one brand and one way of operating so that our customers can actually receive the same service in Seattle as they do in Savanah or Vancouver as opposed to Halifax,” said Chris Munro, RoadLink, president and CEO, in an interview.

RoadLink’s strategy when it comes to acquisitions, said Munro is to integrate its acquisitions into one company so that it can demonstrate to its large customers that it can be viewed as one large North American network which can execute its services from anywhere in the continent. He added that the North American market is “increasingly consolidating,” because a lot of players are undercapitalized and don’t have the necessary technology requirements, coupled with the fact that the bigger customers want to focus down on a dramatically fewer number of suppliers.

Some of RoadLink’s recent deals include acquiring West Coast Trucking last February and Transus Intermodal in January 2007. RoadLink was acquired by Fenway Partners in September 2006.

Munro explained that RoadLink focuses on four distinct customer groups: railways, steamship lines, intermodal marketing companies, and 3PLs. And with Hapag Lloyd as an existing customer, he said it had been working with Hapag for the last nine months on ways to reduce its costs for internal, inland distribution, with one of the fallouts of that was the idea of taking the C-Truck asset and fold it into RoadLink’s North American infrastructure. This, in turn, will give Hapag a broader-based North American transportation network going forward, he said.

And with the acquisition of C-Truck, which has six U.S.- and Canada-based locations and roughly 240 owner-operated trucks (which brings RoadLink’s total fleet size to approximately 2,800 owner-operators), Roadlink and Fastfrate will be able to provide shippers with one-stop, seamlessly integrated and cost-effective transportation and cross-border services throughout North America, according to Roadlink. The company added that shippers will be able to leverage Roadlink’s proprietary TrueVision software to track containers from inbound vessels through the distribution system to final destination.

“What we are doing with Fastfrate is offering an LLP (lead logistics provider) concept, and when we execute the Canadian business we will receive all the orders and then transmit the orders to our Canadian sister company [Fastfrate] and between the two we will decide who does the cross-border traffic movements, and then Fastfrate will take on delivering all of the Canadian business,” said Munro.

He also pointed out the Fastfrate has an excellent footprint in Canada, which gives RoadLink the flexibility to shift out of Canada and leverage Fastfrate north of the border.