APX: Package Collapse
Traffic World reports in this week’s print edition on the aftermath of the collapse of Parcel Select consolidator APX, which the magazine calls “the largest shutdown of [a] cargo transportation provider since the close of USF Red Star in spring 2004 and before that the abrupt shuttering of national LTL giant Consolidated Freightways in 2001.”
Competitors like DHL scrambled to sign up APX customers, as did the Postal Service itself. Regardless of where those customers end up, the story says, they will “almost certainly see shipping costs rise in the long run as the dust of APX’s demise settles.”
APX started life as American Package Express. “In 2004, Heritage Partners acquired the well-regarded small-package division of RR Donnelley Logistics and combined it with American Package, naming the new entity APX Logistics… Last November it added Chester King, a former USPS marketing executive, to head its postal affairs.”
A Bear Stearns analyst, Edward M. Wolfe, cited in the story, suggests ”the big integrated parcel carriers are likely to benefit the most in the near term as APX customers divert packages to those higher priced ground networks. But in the long run, Wolfe wrote, those volumes would probably be converted to comparable bulk mail services at those same companies.”
