Freightos urges shippers to move beyond annual freight tenders

For many procurement teams, freight sourcing is still organised around a once-a-year tender cycle. Freightos argues that this is no longer enough, because the market they are trying to manage changes far more quickly than a 12-month contract can accommodate. As one company speaker put it in a recent webinar: “The 12-month cycles that tenders are currently having can actually not deal with the changes in the market.”

That warning comes at a time when volatility has become a ...

structural feature of shipping rather than a temporary disruption. In its Review of Maritime Transport 2025, UN Trade and Development said freight markets across container, dry bulk and tanker shipping remained highly unsettled from January 2024 through mid-2025, with geopolitical tensions, trade policy shifts, regulation and mismatches between capacity and demand all contributing to swings in rates. The report also noted that Red Sea rerouting lengthened voyages, constrained effective capacity and pushed up operating costs before prices later eased.

Against that backdrop, Freightos says procurement teams should stop treating sourcing as a single annual event and start managing it as a continuous discipline. The company’s view is that the traditional rhythm of issuing one large request for quotation, locking in rates and waiting for the next review leaves organisations exposed to sudden changes in fuel, carrier pricing and trade-lane conditions.

The first step, according to Freightos, is to bring order to the underlying data. Procurement teams often rely on spreadsheets, email chains and disconnected systems, which makes it difficult to compare quotes or react quickly when the market moves. Standardised rate-card formats, centralised records and shared access to a single source of truth are presented as the foundation for any more agile approach. Without that, the company argues, even basic rate comparisons become slow and inconsistent.

Freightos also says much of the administrative burden around tendering can be automated. In its view, tasks such as generating requests for quotation, inviting carriers, checking submissions and running initial validations do not require human judgement and should not consume procurement teams’ time. Its Procure software is designed to replace manual coordination with automated workflows, allowing teams to launch repeated requests more quickly and focus on the commercial trade-offs that actually need expert input. The company says this can free procurement staff to spend more time on balancing cost, service and risk, and on explaining those choices internally.

A second pillar of the strategy is benchmarking against live market conditions rather than comparing only one carrier against another. Freightos says many enterprise shippers have a sense of whether their rates are high or low, but lack a reliable independent reference point. Its Terminal product provides daily ocean and air benchmarks, and the company says these are built from more than $50 billion in real commercial freight spend. Freightos also says its forecasting tools combine historical patterns, seasonality, market events and expert judgement to estimate rate movements up to six months ahead. The company presents this as a way to help shippers decide whether to lock in rates, wait for better conditions or use a different procurement strategy altogether.

That forward-looking element matters because timing can change the economics of a tender. UN Trade and Development’s maritime report found that market stress, rerouting and shifting demand can move rates quickly, which means a contract agreed in one quarter may bear little resemblance to market conditions a few months later. Freightos argues that procurement teams should therefore use regular market intelligence to decide whether to run a full tender, extend an existing arrangement or narrow the exercise to particularly volatile lanes.

The company also recommends replacing the all-or-nothing annual bid with smaller, more frequent mini-bids. In its view, this gives shippers a way to test the market throughout the year and adjust more selectively. If forecasts point to falling prices, it may make sense to tender more aggressively; if rates are rising, a temporary extension with existing carriers could be the better option. Freightos likens the approach to portfolio management, with a mix of spot exposure, mini-bids and longer-term agreements rather than a single fixed bet.

Fuel and bunker adjustment factor charges are another area where Freightos says many organisations lose control of costs. Because fuel prices can shift sharply over the course of a contract, a fixed surcharge mechanism can become disconnected from reality. Freightos says its tools can automatically update fuel-related charges using carrier workflows and indexed triggers, allowing teams to link adjustments to a published benchmark and approve changes with less manual intervention. The company points to the Freightos Baltic Index and related market data as references that can help procurement teams keep charges aligned with current conditions.

The Freightos Baltic Index itself is produced with the Baltic Exchange and is intended to reflect container freight pricing across major trade lanes using aggregated commercial rate data. Freightos says it can be used to assess whether a shipper’s contracted rates remain competitive and to support budget planning and routing decisions. The Baltic Exchange’s methodology guide sets out how the benchmark is calculated and how route-level figures are derived, underscoring that it is intended as a market reference rather than a static tariff.

Freightos says the operational benefits of this more flexible model extend beyond freight budgets. It argues that finance teams can track how rates compare with benchmarks over time, which should make cost discussions less adversarial and forecasts easier to defend. Carrier relationships may also improve if negotiations follow a regular cadence rather than appearing only when a company wants an urgent price cut. Internally, procurement may gain more credibility if its rhythm mirrors the market’s rather than ignoring it.

The broader point is that freight procurement is increasingly about responsiveness, not just discipline. The annual tender still has a place, but Freightos says it should be only one part of a broader system that combines clean data, automation, benchmarking and indexed adjustments. In a market shaped by geopolitical shocks, route disruptions and rapid rate changes, that approach is less about chasing savings in a single event and more about building a procurement process that can move with the market rather than behind it.

Source: Noah Wire Services