Latest news with #UberFreight
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Borderlands Mexico: Winner in global tariff war could be Mexico, report says
Borderlands is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week: Winner in global tariff war could be Mexico, report says; secures distribution rights for Corona beer; and Korean auto supplier opens factory in Mexico. Mexico could reap the benefits of President Donald Trump's global tariff war and is poised to continue profiting from the growing trend of nearshoring. While the average U.S. tariff rate rose to as high as 28% on countries around the world after Trump's 'Liberation Day' import tax announcement on April 2, most goods from Mexico to the U.S. qualify for tariff-free treatment under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The USMCA 'positions Mexico as a reliable alternative for companies seeking to reduce exposure to trade friction and long lead times from overseas markets,' according to Uber Freight's 2025 Q2 Market Update. 'Nearshoring .. might slow down a little bit, but it is not going away,' Jose Guerrero, Uber Freight's director of U.S. customs, told FreightWaves in an interview. 'As a matter of fact, there's a lot of Chinese investment in Mexico that's happening. Our sales teams are really engaged with those companies.' Nearshoring involves relocating business operations, particularly manufacturing and production, from countries around the globe to Mexico, which is geographically closer to the U.S. The shift in supply chain strategy aims to benefit from Mexico's trade agreement with the U.S. and other nations, along with the country's lower labor costs and streamlined supply chains across North American markets. Tariffs on goods imported from China to the U.S. vary significantly depending on the product, with rates ranging from 0% to 145%, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The average tariff rate on Chinese exports to the US is currently around 51.1%, Mexico was the top trading partner of the U.S. in April, with two-way commerce totaling $69.7 billion, a 4% year-over-year decline compared to April 2024. Canada ranked No. 2 in trade at $56.6 billion in April. China ranked third at $33.6 billion, followed by Germany at $20.5 billion and Japan at $20.4 billion. 'Mexico and Canada are the biggest trading partners with the U.S., and with some of the changes that have transpired over the last couple of months … Those companies that are really taking advantage of the whole USMCA program have really not stopped, trade never stops,' Guerrero said. 'The volume continues to be there. I think customers are starting to realize that maybe this might be the new norm. There are some customers who are a little hesitant because obviously tariffs can impact bottom lines. But at the end of the day, they have orders to fulfill, and consumers are still buying, so the demand is still there.' Guerrero said customers have been seeking solutions to lessen the impact of import tariffs on supply chains. 'What our customers are saying is that they're trying to be smarter … 'How can I mitigate my risk or mitigate my tariff outlay or duty outlays,' Guerrero said. 'They're not looking to avoid it, because avoidance is never a way. Tariffs are put in place, and they're going to be in place until legislation changes it.' Shippers are closely examining their entire supply chain in search of cost-saving opportunities, according to Guerrero. 'More customers are starting to ask the right questions,' Guerrero explained. ''Where are my components made? Where are they sourced from? How does that affect my overall costs—or even the duties I pay on certain goods?'' Guerrero's top advice for shippers is to 'know your data, stay current on regulations and costs change daily. And most importantly, talk to your customs brokers and service providers. We have the insights and updates you need to stay ahead.' Laredo, Texas-based recently signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Corona beer. The strategic alliance grants the right to distribute Corona across select duty-free zones, emerging markets and special international territories, according to a news release. As part of the agreement, will handle the importation, warehousing, and distribution of Corona products — including bottles, cans and multi-packs — across its network of authorized retailers, hospitality operators, and wholesalers in international markets Founded in 1998, is an online marketplace that allows customers to purchase duty-free products from thousands of vendors worldwide. The company operates logistics centers in Panama, Curaçao, Mexico and the U.S. Corona beer is owned by AB InBev. Constellation Brands holds the exclusive rights to import, market, and sell Corona in the U.S. Korean automotive company SL MEX announced the completion of a $45 million production plant in Villa de Reyes, Mexico, according to Cluster Industrial. The 150,695-square-foot factory will produce automotive headlamp modules for global clients such as BMW, General Motors, Hyundai and Kia. The facility currently employs 385 workers. Villa de Reyes is a municipality in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi in central Mexico. SL MEX is the Mexico-based subsidiary of SL Corp., a global automotive supplier based in Daegu, South Korea. The company was founded in 1954 and has 12 factories around the world. SL Corp. employs more than 12,000 workers. The post Borderlands Mexico: Winner in global tariff war could be Mexico, report says appeared first on FreightWaves. Sign in to access your portfolio
Fast Company
27-06-2025
- Automotive
- Fast Company
Aurora hits a self-driving trucking milestone. But the road ahead is still bumpy
Self-driving vehicle startups have often drawn skepticism for overpromising and underdelivering—see: Argo AI and GM's Cruise subsidiary, both now in corporate junkyards—but in early May, one of them achieved a milestone that had long eluded the industry: delivering a truckload of cargo for a paying customer on public roads—with no human behind the wheel. Aurora's May 1 announcement that it had begun commercial deliveries for its first customers, Hirschbach Motor Lines and Uber Freight, on two autonomous semitrailer trucks between Dallas and Houston followed some eight years of work by the Pittsburgh-based firm. Aurora reached that milestone about half a year later than it had planned last year, owing to extra time needed to complete its 'safety case' testing and self-certification. 'This is a multiyear journey,' says Aurora president Ossa Fisher. 'A few months seemed minuscule in the grand scheme of both the opportunity that lies ahead of us and what came before.' But barely two weeks after the announcement, the company was back to having safety operators sitting behind the wheels of the two trucks.
Associated Press
16-06-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Cascale Hosts Roundtable at Reuters Supply Chain USA in Chicago
At the recent Reuters Supply Chain USA event in Chicago, hundreds of manufacturing and consumer goods stakeholders convened under the theme 'Navigate Complexity in an Era of Uncertainty.' The two-day event brought together a diverse range of supply chain professionals across freight, logistics, and manufacturing for products in beauty, fashion, tech, and more. Acknowledged throughout the programming was the rapid rise of artificial intelligence across industries, as well as the impact of tariffs on global trade and sourcing. Representing an apparel perspective, Cascale hosted a sustainability session titled 'Reframing Resilience: How to Win While Still Greening the Supply Chain.' The roundtable drew executives from retail, private equity, supply chain planning, data, and tech, including Ulta Beauty and the B Corp-certified logistics company, Flock Freight. The session hit on critical points for today's decision-maker, including sustainability commitments, supplier diversification, regionality in sourcing and climate risk, geopolitical awareness. In another session, Nikhil Abuja, director of last-mile planning and supply chain at Amazon, a Cascale member, took the stage alongside speakers from FedEx and The Circular Supply Chain Network. Abuja spoke about scaling analytics and capturing customer data on deliveries to improve efficiency – noting that agility and adaptability are critical to logistical success. His team is also responsible for adding electric vehicles to the delivery fleet. Similarly, Uber Freight's Eric Berdinis, director of product management, focused on digitizing the entire supply chain – a $200-billion-dollar offshoot business for the rideshare app. By investing in guaranteed upfront pricing and bundled bookings, Uber Freight was able to reduce roughly four million empty miles. In his session, he played a video demonstrating new feats from Uber Freight like driverless semi-trucks and generative AI supply chain agents with uncanny likeness to humans because of 'natural language' use, including pauses. In a conversation that echoed one taking place in fashion Erik Lopez, chief supply chain officer at Ulta Beauty, introduced a concept of 'fast beauty' wherein the beauty retailer is super responsive to changing consumer trends – not unlike fashion. Ulta Beauty also relies heavily on split-cart fulfillment, with some 40 percent of purchases being Buy Online Pickup in Store, or BOPIS. 'It's really about amplifying and enabling our team rather than replacing them,' he said. The conference closed with a session on workforce empowerment for building resilient supply chains. Visit 3BL Media to see more multimedia and stories from Cascale
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Uber Freight bets big on AI tools to grow its business
Three years ago, as the pandemic caused chaos for companies big and small, Colgate-Palmolive's chief supply chain officer Luciano Sieber orchestrated a 'logistics blitz.' The result gave Sieber a better understanding of how Colgate-Palmolive moves its products around the world. But it stuck Sieber with another problem: too much data. About a year ago, Sieber says he found a solution to that problem with Uber Freight. The ride-hailing service's long-running logistics and analytics arm has been developing new ways to wrangle large amounts of data by using artificial intelligence. Colgate-Palmolive became one of the first companies to use one of its newest products, a logistics-focused LLM Uber Freight calls Insights AI. Now, Uber Freight is more formally launching a suite of AI features to shippers around the world as part of its existing supply chain software. That includes an expansion of Insights AI, which Uber Freight quietly launched in 2023, as well as more than 30 AI agents built to 'execute key logistics tasks throughout the freight lifecycle.' Uber Freight is not alone in trying to tame unruly supply chains with modern artificial intelligence tools. Flexport announced its own suite of AI tools in February, and there are myriad startups trying to help companies wrangle data, reduce inventory stockpiles, and better predict supply and demand. But Uber Freight is betting its AI solutions can make an immediate impact on the bottom line of both its blue-chip customers and the nearly 10,000 other shippers it works with. That's largely because of the knowledge base and relationships it has established in the eight years since it was created to match long-haul truckers with shippers. 'Supply chain is inherently a data-rich problem. It's complex, it's nuanced, and AI can serve a fundamental role in shaping it and accelerating it,' Uber Freight founder Lior Ron said in an interview with TechCrunch. Uber Freight began as a more straightforward brokerage business model when it launched in 2017. But the Uber subsidiary has steadily evolved over the years into more of a service provider to companies that ship goods around the world. Many modern companies are trying to find ways to incorporate artificial intelligence (often to mixed results); it should come as no surprise that Uber Freight is putting the technology front and center. After all, both Ron's undergraduate work and his master's thesis were centered around AI -- way back 'in the dark ages when it was called 'neural networks,'' he joked. Ron continued to work with machine learning technology when he was running Google Maps from 2007 until 2016. It was there, he said, that he saw 'the potential of digitizing the physical universe.' 'That sort of led me to the foundational belief, nine years ago, that supply chain is fundamentally a data-first, technology-first challenge that could be accelerated with data connectivity, and over time, AI,' he said. 'We've been building towards this moment, I think, since I started Uber Freight.' Ron said Uber Freight has used machine learning in its work since the beginning. But it was around two years ago that the team started trying to work with more advanced generative AI capabilities. That 'hasn't been an easy road,' Ron said. Uber Freight's initial attempts at building a sort of 'co-pilot for logistics' were riddled with hallucinations and returned accurate answers only around 60% to 70% of the time. Now that technology has been 'battle tested' and is 'driving real business outcomes,' with an accuracy rate of 98%, according to Ron. The company says the Insights AI model has been trained on internal and external data related to the $20 billion worth of freight that it helps move every year. It also leverages multiple undisclosed AI models "providing optimal combinations of price, precision and performance," according to Uber Freight. Ron said this AI push creates new ways for customers to work with the data related to their supply chain. They can ask Insights AI to quickly pull up, say, the worst-performing origin points for particular shipments. Or they can ask to be shown 'all shipments to CVS in 2023.' Ron stressed that the queries can be far more complex than this, too, and the model always keeps up. Insights AI is presented to customers much like other popular LLM interfaces; it will also show its work and make clear where all the data is coming from, just like other reasoning models. All of this lets a customer 'gain insights on your network much faster, at close to 100% accuracy instantly, versus formulating what you want to know, sending it to some analysts, and waiting for two weeks for the PowerPoint presentation to come back to have a discussion,' Ron said. Uber Freight works with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, but it found a particularly willing partner in Colgate-Palmolive to trial Insights AI and its other new tools. The conglomerate already makes a suite of AI models available to all of its employees, according to Sieber. It also makes those workers take a mandatory training on AI ethics that was developed in-house. 'I think it's great, because it turns the conversation from fear into, 'how that makes me more efficient, and how [do] I become a better professional and deliver more by having access and using those new technologies,'' Sieber said. For instance, Sieber said his company has used Insights AI to easily identify carriers who are accepting fewer shipments than they're contractually obligated to move. From there, they can work out why those levels are low, and either come up with a solution to get the carrier back in compliance or drop them in favor of another. This was previously a challenge to solve in real time, Sieber said, because companies like Colgate-Palmolive work with thousands of carriers. Each of those might work with different systems and workflows, and all of that resulting information was never really centrally managed. The next step with AI, both Sieber and Ron said, has been finding ways to create more proactive solutions. Ron said this is another place Uber Freight can flex its data strengths. 'We know the facilities, we know the lanes, we know the prices,' he said. 'What do you want to know?' These more proactive integrations come in the form of alerts that tell a customer like Colgate-Palmolive they're overpaying on certain routes, or that there are faster options available for a particular shipment. Any single suggestion like that may only save a few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand, dollars. But aggregated over an entire network, it could make a big difference. That's why, when asked, Sieber was quick to answer that Colgate-Palmolive's chief financial officer is the executive who's most pleased with what Uber Freight's enabled. 'He loves to see logistics costs coming down,' Sieber laughed. This article originally appeared on TechCrunch at Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
TechCrunch
21-05-2025
- Business
- TechCrunch
Uber Freight bets big on AI tools to grow its business
Three years ago, as the pandemic caused chaos for companies big and small, Colgate-Palmolive's chief supply chain officer Luciano Sieber orchestrated a 'logistics blitz.' The result gave Sieber a better understanding of how Colgate-Palmolive moves its products around the world. But it stuck Sieber with another problem: too much data. About a year ago, Sieber says he found a solution to that problem with Uber Freight. The ride-hailing service's long-running logistics and analytics arm has been developing new ways to wrangle large amounts of data by using artificial intelligence. Colgate-Palmolive became one of the first companies to use one of its newest products, a a logistics-focused LLM Uber Freight calls Inisights AI. Now, Uber Freight is more formally launching a suite of AI features to shippers around the world as part of its existing supply chain software. That includes an expansion of Insights AI, which Uber Freight quietly launched in 2023, as well as more than 30 AI agents built to 'execute key logistics tasks throughout the freight lifecycle.' Uber Freight is not alone in trying to tame unruly supply chains with modern artificial intelligence tools. Flexport announced its own suite of AI tools in February, and there are myriad startups trying to help companies wrangle data, reduce inventory stockpiles, and better predict supply and demand. But Uber Freight is betting its AI solutions can make an immediate impact on the bottom line of both its blue-chip customers and the nearly 10,000 other shippers it works with. That's largely because of the knowledge base and relationships it has established in the eight years since it was created to match long-haul truckers with shippers. 'Supply chain is inherently a data-rich problem. It's complex, it's nuanced, and AI can serve a fundamental role in shaping it and accelerating it,' Uber Freight founder Lior Ron said in an interview with TechCrunch. Techcrunch event Join us at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot for our leading AI industry event with speakers from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere. For a limited time, tickets are just $292 for an entire day of expert talks, workshops, and potent networking. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you've built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | REGISTER NOW 'We've been building towards this moment' Uber Freight began as a more straightforward brokerage business model when it launched in 2017. But the Uber subsidiary has steadily evolved over the years into more of a service provider to companies that ship goods around the world. Many modern companies are trying to find ways to incorporate artificial intelligence (often to mixed results); it should come as no surprise that Uber Freight is putting the technology front and center. After all, both Ron's undergraduate work and his master thesis were centered around AI – way back 'in the dark ages when it was called 'neural networks,'' he joked. Ron continued to work with machine learning technology when he was running Google Maps from 2007 until 2016. It was there, he said, that he saw 'the potential of digitizing the physical universe.' 'That sort of led me to the foundational belief, nine years ago, that supply chain is fundamentally a data-first, technology-first challenge that could be accelerated with data connectivity, and over time, AI,' he said. 'We've been building towards this moment, I think, since I started Uber Freight.' Ron said Uber Freight has used machine learning in its work since the beginning. But it was around two years ago that the team started trying to work with more advanced generative AI capabilities. That 'hasn't been an easy road,' Ron said. Uber Freight's initial attempts at building a sort of 'co-pilot for logistics' were riddled with hallucinations and returned accurate answers only around 60% to 70% of the time. Now that technology has been 'battle tested' and is 'driving real business outcomes,' with an accuracy rate of 98%, according to Ron. The company says the Insights AI model has been trained on internal and external data related to the $20 billion worth of freight that it helps move every year. It also leverages multiple undisclosed AI models 'providing optimal combinations of price, precision and performance,' according to Uber Freight. Ron said this AI push creates new ways for customers to work with the data related to their supply chain. They can ask Insights AI to quickly pull up, say, the worst-performing origin points for particular shipments. Or they can ask to be shown 'all shipments to CVS in 2023.' Ron stressed that the queries can be far more complex than this, too, and the model always keeps up. Insights AI is presented to customers much like other popular LLM interfaces; it will also show its work and make clear where all the data is coming from, just like other reasoning models. All of this lets a customer 'gain insights on your network much faster, at close to 100% accuracy instantly, versus formulating what you want to know, sending it to some analysts, and waiting for two weeks for the PowerPoint presentation to come back to have a discussion,' Ron said. 'What do you want to know?' Uber Freight works with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, but it found a particularly willing partner in Colgate-Palmolive to trial Insights AI and its other new tools. The conglomerate already makes a suite of AI models available to all of its employees, according to Sieber. It also makes those workers take a mandatory training on AI ethics that was developed in-house. 'I think it's great, because it turns the conversation from fear into, 'how that makes me more efficient, and how [do] I become a better professional and deliver more by having access and using those new technologies,' Sieber said. For instance, Sieber said his company has used Insights AI to easily identify carriers who are accepting fewer shipments than they're contractually obligated to to move. From there, they can work out why those levels are low, and either come up with a solution to get the carrier back in compliance or drop them in favor of another. This was previously a challenge to solve in real time, Sieber said, because companies like Colgate-Palmolive work with thousands of carriers. Each of those might work with different systems and workflows, and all of that resulting information was never really centrally managed. The next step with AI, both Sieber and Ron said, has been finding ways to create more proactive solutions. Ron said this is another place Uber Freight can flex its data strengths. 'We know the facilities, we know the lanes, we know the prices,' he said. 'What do you want to know?' These more proactive integrations come in the form of alerts that tell a customer like Colgate-Palmolive they're overpaying on certain routes, or that there are faster options available for a particular shipment. Any single suggestion like that may only save a few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand dollars. But aggregated over an entire network, it could make a big difference. That's why, when asked, Sieber was quick to answer that Colgate-Palmolive's chief financial officer is the executive who's most pleased with what Uber Freight's enabled. 'He loves to see logistics costs coming down,' Sieber laughed.
