I used to work for UPS and tried to understand Flexport business model, but could not find any value that Flexport bringing to the table. Can someone explain to me what value Flexport is bringing ?
Basically, if you want to buy goods from China, usually you do it by container load. You rent the container, get a 3pl ( a broker) to arrange the shipments and port
If you want to ship less than a 20 foot container load, e.g. a pallet, your goods are shared between multiple parties who also are shipping that container.
Flexport can handle those clients and also clients who want to ship full containers of goods overseas
Basically, modern online freight forwarding and logistics. That industry is still very manually driven with old tech (edi and xml) that aren't consistent across shipping ports
I would say it's kind of like the Uber eats for shipping containers... where takeout meals are pallets and Uber drivers are 40 foot containers, the hungry customer is the business buying the goods from the restaurant
UPS delivers the end product from a warehouse to the customer's house.
But first the company selling that product had to get thousands of units of the product from the manufacturing facility to its warehouse. Before that they had to get all of the components or raw materials for that product to the manufacturing facility. Many of those components would have been manufactured by a different company that had to get its own components and raw materials to its own facility, and on and on down the chain. And these could be huge quantities of materials that require heavy machinery to transport and a lot of coordination to make sure that's available at the right time. They can't just get dropped off at the front door like a UPS delivery.
As far as I understand it, Flexport is basically building the rails for all of the different logistics and freight companies involved in this kind of commercial shipping to talk to each other more efficiently. Apparently many of them are still using phone calls and fax machines to organize these kinds of deliveries.
Until recently UPS had freight business as well, from what I know, it wasn't doing so well and they sold it to another company. UPS has massive supply chain business, they can deliver from manufacturer to the end user, from what I know, it roughly 30% of their business. And if you $big$ enough, they can manage all your inventory and manage entire logistics needs.