Mr. Patrik Berglund
CEO
What is Xeneta?
Xeneta is the leading ocean freight rate benchmarking and market intelligence platform.
Who owns it, where is it registered and who came up with the idea of establishing Xeneta? Where does the name come from?
Xeneta is a privately owned company backed by renowned venture capital firms. It’s registered and headquartered in Oslo, Norway with offices in Hamburg and New York.
My colleague Thomas Sorbo and I wanted to make liner-shipping pricing more transparent as we perceived it to be an opaque and challenging market to operate in – especially with the high degree of volatility in the market. As we believe the concept of collecting, cleansing, standardizing and aggregating rates to present market intelligence, was applicable for multiple modes of transportation – we wanted to find a brand name we could build around – and Xeneta was chosen as it had a somewhat mystical ring to it – and, perhaps even more decisive, the dot-com domain was available. The latter is always a challenge establishing any company in today’s world.
What kind of services do you provide in the logistics market of today?
We provide subscription services to the most granular market intelligence you can find for containerized shipping – built on the world’s largest database of contracted rates.
Are normal container rates easy to monitor? How about special equipment and/or project cargoes, is that something that you could provide services for as well?
In terms of pricing, standard dry van boxes, as well as reefer and tank boxes, are very hard to monitor when you take the different contract durations, amount of trade routes and volatility into consideration. This is the scope we’re targeting with our platform – and we’ve decided to leave out equipment types such as flat-racks and open toppers as there’s not enough liquidity in the market for the different trade routes to properly provide market intelligence on a level we’d feel reflects our current offering.
Tell us about your customers, in general, would they be freight forwarders, shippers or?
Our main target has always been shippers – the multi-national corporations – but as we’ve expanded our product offering we’ve always believed we should help level the playing field for all stakeholders that want to leverage our software and database. So over the last couple of years, we’ve also started working with the market leading NVOs as well as carriers. Today we have a customer base consisting of shippers, NVOs, carriers, tech companies, financial institutions, consultancies, etc. from all continents.
Would you say that a market intelligence company like yourself has competition in the market? Tell us how you view your own advantages.
I’d say that any business has its competitors. As for our space it sure isn’t overly crowded – and our uniqueness comes from our technology approach to tackle the problem which allows us to digest and consume tens of millions of rates per annum in all different shapes and formats in an efficient and scalable way – because ultimately the density of our database determines the reach and accuracy of our product. As we’ve scaled our solution our information represents something that’s unprecedented within liner-shipping – benefiting everyone involved. Building up this critical mass of customers and data is really the entry barrier for anyone replicating our offering using the same approach.
Tell us about how many customers you have helped over the years and what your future plans are.
We’ve provided intel to more than 1000 companies worldwide – several of them amongst the world’s fortune 500 – and this year we’re expanding our offering into air-cargo. With a combined liner-shipping and air-cargo offering our core focus will be to continue scaling and expanding the business internationally.
How to get in touch with you?
www.xeneta.com would always be a great starting point.
Interviewee:
Mr. Patrik Berglund
CEO
patrik.berglund@xeneta.com
Xeneta
https://www.xeneta.com/