The American economy is a vast, living organism comprised of a cellular structure of raw capitalistic forces pushing and pulling against one another, with vast quantities of goods and services changing hands on a daily basis. This juggernaut is quantifiable by metrics like the official U.S. GDP figure for last year of some $17.42 trillion dollars and its lifeblood cannot be circulated without the logistical capacity provided by often overlooked, yet inherently vital components such as the trucking industry, which moves nearly 70 percent of all freight tonnage in the country. By any measure, without the trucking industry, the engine of American prosperity would come to a grinding halt.
The 37,000 plus member-strong federation of trucking groups known as the ATA (American Trucking Associations), valued this sector in its annual report last year at over $700 billion in revenue. A huge sum of money that is underpinned by roughly three million heavy-duty Class 8 trucks, which consume in excess of 37 billion gallons of diesel in order to keep the roughly 9.96 billion tons of annual freight moving around the country.
The industry as a whole employed over seven million people as of 2013 alone, including more than 3.4 million drivers, with commercial trucks representing a $16.5 million plus in contributions to government coffers via federal highway user fees. The industry also continues to be plagued by a persistent driver shortage and faces numerous other challenges, such as CSA (Carrier Safety Administration) regulations, including driving limit HOS (Hours-of-Service) compliance and pending driver coercion regulations, which seek to address the problem of drivers being pressured by dispatchers (and others) to violate federal stipulations and meet increasingly unrealistic delivery deadlines.
This industry also remains highly fragmented, with 50 of the biggest players, like versatile provider of surface transportation, delivery and logistics services J B Hunt (NASDAQ: JBHT), or transportation, logistics and supply-chain management giant Con-way (NYSE: CNW), accounting for less than 30 percent of the overall market. This is the kind of fragmentation so brilliantly taken advantage of in other industries by companies like on-demand ride-sharing car service firm Uber, which was worth just $18 billion a year ago and is now posting valuations in the neighborhood of $50 billion. With some reports now suggesting that Uber’s innovative approach to app-driven, on-demand servicing could effectively drive more than $2 billion in revenue this year alone, similar innovations in the trucking industry should be of considerable interest to savvy investors.
It is into this highly fragmented environment that trucking industry innovator On the Move Systems (OTC: OMVS) has stepped, with its ground-breaking ISTx Platform technology designed to synchronize supply chain dynamics within the freight industry, employing similar shared economy business modeling concepts that have so successfully been exploited by companies like Uber, or social network-driven lodging rental site developer Airbnb. By creating the software and instrumentation architecture required to transform the freight industry, OMVS is within striking distance of fully bringing forward a solution that unites business applications with logistics inventory and the end-customers, allowing for on-demand local freight carrier service to be obtained readily.
This concept of on-demand freight has immense potential for growing the overall industry. By making a wider variety of interstate shipping methods accessible to more players within the sector, while also improving overall cost efficiencies through synchronized supply chain realizations and the lowering of delivery times, the on-demand freight model being created by OMVS could forever change the face of the trucking industry. Indeed, the emergence of such innovation could have truly transformative implications, with route optimization created by a subsequently interwoven national and local carrier web leading to efficiencies never before thought possible. The company’s roll out of a shared economy app to power this on-demand freight vision was recently bolstered by the announcement that the company has tapped a prominent Houston-area software design firm to assist in executing the final phases.
On the Move Systems has clearly defined an implementation vector here for doing to interstate shipping what Uber has done for hailing a cab, but within in an industry that is several times larger and of inestimably greater vital significance to the underlying economy. The global potential of the OMVS model is telegraphed by the proliferation of Uber-type service models in other countries around the world and the extensibility of the toolkit OMVS is putting together to tap this global potential is something that has been creating considerable buzz in the investment community of late. The company’s ability to connect users to a premier group of international providers that can deliver the widest possible array of cargo availability and shipping options, as well as access to route information, is a unique advantage that will allow users to make highly effective decisions within minutes, and all without the kind of routine guess work that currently hampers nearly every operator in the industry.
The latest announcement of having tapped a crucial build developer for the app marks a major milestone for On the Move Systems and represents the culmination of extensive interface research and engineering efforts over the last several months. OMVS has already attracted a great deal of interest from local and national trucking firms looking to get in on the ground floor with the company’s Uber-style freight portal and the long-term revenue potential of the platform for OMVS, driven by a shared economy model and enhanced profit margins for everyone involved, continues to sustain shareholder confidence.
Learn more by visiting www.onthemovesystems.com
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