Everyone bought somebody this week

C.H. Robinson announced yesterday that it's buying RXO for $5.8 billion in cash and stock, or $30.25 a share, 29% above RXO's Friday closing price. Regulators and RXO's shareholders still have to approve it, and both companies expect it to close in the first half of 2027. MFN Partners, which owns 17% of RXO, has already agreed to vote yes.

RXO is the brokerage XPO spun off in 2022, and it bought Coyote Logistics from UPS in 2024. It also runs what it calls the largest last-mile network for heavy goods in North America, arranging more than 11 million deliveries a year of appliances, mattresses, furniture and fitness equipment, including installation and assembly. Put together, the two companies work with about 93,000 shippers and 600,000 carriers, and Supply Chain Dive notes there's very little customer overlap, since most of RXO's revenue comes from retail and ecommerce, manufacturing, and food and beverage.

Robinson expects $300 million in savings within two years by running RXO the way it runs itself, with AI agents across RXO's workflows and fewer offices. That model took Robinson's headcount from about 14,990 people in early 2024 to roughly 12,085 at the end of 2025, while its margins rose. Robinson's Navisphere platform will replace RXO's system for the truckload and LTL work the two overlap on, and Robinson says RXO has "some very interesting technology" in last mile and expedited that it may keep.

Supply Chain Dive's estimates put RXO at about $6.8 billion in revenue and $1 billion in adjusted gross profit this year, so Robinson is paying around 85 cents per dollar of revenue and close to six times gross profit. RXO's stock jumped about 22% before the open, and Robinson's fell almost 5%.

What this means for you: Nothing changes this peak, since the deal won't close until next year. If you buy truckload or LTL from both companies, you're about to lose a bid in every RFP you run, so bring in a third broker or a regional asset carrier now while it's your idea. Robinson cut 19% of its own staff running the same playbook, so keep a second contact at both companies, because the rep you have today may not be there in a year.

On September 30, a three-judge panel at the Court of International Trade heard the challenge to the forced-labor tariffs, the 10% and 12.5% duties the U.S. Trade Representative put on goods from 60 trading partners on July 24. They cover 99.4% of U.S. imports. The administration turned to Section 301 of the Trade Act after the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs in February.

The lead plaintiff is Learning Resources, the Illinois educational toy company that also sued under IEEPA, joined by other small businesses and 25 states. Their lawyer argued the forced-labor label is a cover for bringing back the duties the Supreme Court struck down. "If you're going to do it at breakneck speed and try to cover the entire globe, you still have to satisfy the statutory requirements," he told the court. The Justice Department said USTR made 60 separate findings and that courts shouldn't second-guess the president's trade policy.

One judge pressed the government's lawyer on which part of the law actually authorizes the tariffs, another said there was "not a lot of depth" in the evidence behind the country-by-country forced-labor findings, and the third asked how much weight to give the president's own public statements about why the tariffs exist. MLex's read is that the court appeared mostly skeptical of USTR. There's no date for a ruling, and whichever side loses can appeal.

We noted in Edition 64 that CBP opens IEEPA refunds on finally liquidated entries on October 6, eight months after the Supreme Court ruled, and only for importers who'd filed a valid importer of record number with CBP by July 31. Nobody knows yet what a refund process for these duties would look like if they fall, but the last one came with eligibility rules that left unprepared importers out.

What this means for you: Keep pricing landed costs with these duties in them, because nothing changes at the border until a court says so. Ask your importer clients whether their customs broker is tracking every entry that paid these duties and what it would take to file for a refund. And if the duties do get struck, any client holding orders until they go away will place those orders together, so have a receiving plan ready.

Flexport launched a connector that lets Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or a company's own AI agents work directly inside its platform. A brand's ops manager can ask in plain English to track a shipment, pull up every exception or customs hold, search rates on any lane, or book a shipment outright, and the agent submits the cargo details, books against the brand's negotiated rates, and comes back with a booking ID and transit time without anyone logging into Flexport. It's built on Model Context Protocol, an open standard AI assistants use to connect to outside software, and Flexport says every agent runs with guardrails and every exception goes to a human.

Flexport's own agents already handle 21 million tasks a year for the more than 13,000 companies on its platform, and its quoting agent builds custom quotes whether the request comes in by email, through an AI assistant, or inside the platform. Ryan Petersen, the founder and CEO, called it "a real first for both the AI industry and the logistics industry; we're giving AI tools the power to actually ship freight in the real world."

The announcement also included Flexport's first fully automated ecommerce fulfillment center outside Chicago, where more than 350 robots bring inventory to workers. Flexport says the building runs at double the efficiency of a traditional warehouse. Flexport has been in ecommerce fulfillment since buying Deliverr from Shopify in 2023, so one company can now ship a brand's container from Asia, clear it through customs, and pick its orders in Illinois, with the freight side bookable from a chat window.

What this means for you: Ask your WMS vendor this month whether an AI assistant can reach your system through an API, and what it would take to give clients read-only access to inventory, order status, and receiving, because a client who can ask a chatbot where their container is at Flexport won't want to email you for where their PO is. Keep it read-only until you've decided who's responsible when an agent gets something wrong, and don't let one create orders or release freight before that's in your contract. If you sell to mid-size brands in the Midwest, you'll hear about the Chicago building in your next pitch, and "double the efficiency" is Flexport's own claim, so answer it with your cost per order and your accuracy numbers.

3PL
CEVA now runs FedEx's old warehouses. CMA CGM closed its $1.4 billion purchase of FedEx Supply Chain on October 1, three months after announcing it, and folded about 34 million square feet and nearly 10,000 people into CEVA Logistics, which now has more than 240 North American locations and around 20,000 employees. FedEx Supply Chain handles fulfillment and returns for healthcare, technology, consumer, and retail companies, and FedEx says the sale lets it focus on healthcare, automotive, aerospace, and data centers. CMA CGM also became a preferred, non-exclusive ocean carrier for FedEx. If you compete for that kind of work, FedEx Supply Chain's mid-size customers now belong to an ocean carrier, and the ones up for renewal next year are worth a call.

LABOR
Warehouses shed 4,100 jobs in September. The jobs report out October 2 had warehousing and storage at 1,831,800 workers, down for the second straight month and 21,600 below a year ago, and temp help services lost 10,900. The whole economy added 29,000 jobs, with July and August revised down by 60,000 combined; unemployment in transportation hit 4.7% against 4.3% a year ago, and consumers told the Conference Board they're the gloomiest since 2014. The labor market heading into peak is softer than last year's, so push back on agency markups and be pickier about which seasonal hires you keep.

SECURITY
More than half of cargo thefts now start with a fake identity. Tive surveyed 442 supply chain leaders and found identity-based fraud, including fictitious pickups and AI-generated identities, behind 55% of the theft methods they could pin down. Companies with someone actively watching tracker alerts got more than half of a stolen load back 45% of the time, against 30% for companies that only reviewed the data afterward, and route deviation alerts pushed it to 53%. Tive sells trackers, so weight it accordingly. The Delaware trailer from Edition 64 left on fake paperwork too. If you ship high-value loads, put a tracker on them and name the person who answers the alert, because 72% of the active-monitoring group responded within an hour and the recovery numbers follow that speed.

LABOR LAW
New Jersey's ABC test became a regulation on October 1. The state Department of Labor's rules spell out how the test applies to unemployment, wage-and-hour, and wage payment law, and a worker only counts as a contractor if they're free from your control, the work is outside your usual business or done off all your premises, and they run an independently established business of their own. There are no industry carve-outs, unlike California's AB5, and it reaches any company anywhere that uses New Jersey workers. Saiber's lawyers say logistics and staffing companies that use contractors for core work fail mostly on the second prong. If you have 1099 drivers, lumpers, or "independent" warehouse help in New Jersey and moving freight is your usual business, get counsel to review those arrangements now.

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