The Morrow Roberson Road Test: Catapult and Xeneta collaboration an all-round win 

© Skypixel

Data sharing is always a win for all involved – as long as the data is good and reliable.  

The latest announcement from Xeneta and Catapult demonstrates this. Catapult customers, who are primarily freight forwarders and NVOCCs, now have access to Xeneta data and can compare the data with their rates. To access the new service, customers must be subscribers to both Catapult and Xeneta.  

Catapult is a freight rate management service provider that offers services such as rate comparison, quote management, and booking and tracking shipments through a single platform. It sounds similar to the growing number of online freight platforms, but having been acquired by Mercator in 2015, which in turn was acquired by Accelya in 2017, the focus has clearly been placed on analytics solutions. 

Xeneta offers a subscription-based and crowd-sourced ocean freight price benchmarking and market intelligence platform that provides visibility into market average prices on over 160,000 port-to-port pairings. 

It says not only will the Catapult community benefit from Xeneta’s data, but for Xeneta, the relationship “pushes the Xeneta brand and market standing on to the next level”.  

Clearly this is an important and much-needed move for Xeneta. As a standalone service, Xeneta’s product is a good one – but growth is needed, particularly as more data providers enter the market. In addition, while many of Xeneta’s customers are shippers, such as Electrolux, Continental, Unilever, Lenovo, Nestlé, L’Oreal and Thyssenkrupp, this latest collaboration will help extend Xeneta’s reach within the freight forwarding and NVOCC community. 

Both companies face a highly competitive market. To not only survive, but also thrive, it’s likely this will not be the last partnership for either of them. Perhaps Catapult and Xeneta will extend their relationship further?  

While ocean freight is the primary product solution for Xeneta, it also offers a similar solution for air freight which was introduced in late 2017. To grow this product further, Xeneta may need to look for a strong collaborative partner.

For Catapult, perhaps a technology partnership could further expand its predictive analytics services to help shippers and forwarders improve their cost allocations by lane even more.