Ceva Logistics increased its adjusted first quarter EBITDA by 7.8 per cent to $55 million despite a 5.3 revenue drop to $1.57 billion.
CEO Xavier Urbain said: “2016 continues the trend we started in 2015. Market headwinds continue to affect all industry players, yet despite this climate CEVA Air and Ocean volumes increased by 1.5 per cent and 1.0 per cent respectively. We also maintain forward momentum through our on-going focus on productivity and procurement improvements in both Freight Management and Contract Logistics. In parallel, we continue to strengthen our market share on the Trans-pacific trade lane.
Contract Logistics EBITDA at $36 million showed a year-on-year increase of 11.4 per cent in constant currency, driven by gains on disposals and improved space utilisation/productivity partly offset by site restructuring and customer bad debt provisioning.
Automotive after-market and tyre sub-sectors were the first areas to implement productivity and process improvements in Q1, with other sectors now following suit. Ceva said Contract Logistics is also closely managing efforts to fill empty warehouse space at the site level.
Freight Management net revenue margin was 30.7 per cent, an increase of 3.9 percentage points year-on-year.
In the face of a soft market, Air volumes increased 1.5 per cent, above a very strong Q1 2015 which was due to US West Coast port congestion.
Ceva said it continued to address reduced Ocean market demand through a focus on trade lane optimization and is seeing first success with Ocean volumes up by one per cent.
