Transportation Operations
Our other segment — transportation — includes our lines for truck brokerage and transportation, LTL, last mile, intermodal, expedite, global forwarding and managed transportation.
Truck Brokerage and Transportation
XPO utilizes a blended transportation model of brokered, owned and contracted capacity for truck transportation. Thenon-asset portion of our model is variable cost and gives us extensive flexibility. It includes our brokerage operations, as well as contracted capacity with independent owner-operators.
Brokerage is compelling to us for a number of reasons. In addition to low fixed costs, it has high free cash flow conversion and minimal capex requirements, with tailwinds from outsourcing and supplier consolidation. Brokerage is also valuable to most of our customers who use XPO for other lines of business. Examples of brokered freight include industrial flows of raw materials and finished goods, consumer goods, sensitive or high-value freight, and freight that requires high security.
We’ve developed a powerful truckload management system called Freight Optimizer that drives our brokerage operations in both North America and Europe. Our Drive XPO app gives truck drivers a way to interact with Freight Optimizer and our XPO Connect platform from the road, locating loads and bidding to fill empty miles.
In North America, our brokerage network includes approximately 38,000 independent carriers representing over a million trucks. This capacity is critically important to shippers — they value our ability to find them trucks and drivers under all kinds of market conditions. In Europe, the largest components of our transportation operations are LTL, dedicated transport and brokerage. These three service lines generate about 80% of our European transport EBITDA. We also have anon-dedicated truckload business that provideson-demand capacity for our customers.
Less-Than-Truckload (LTL)
Our LTL business in North America is asset-based; it utilizes employee drivers, a fleet of tractors and trailers for line-haul,pick-up and delivery of pallets, and a network of terminals. In Western Europe, where we’re a leading LTL provider, we use the optimal capacity model for each national market. In the UK, for example, we own the trucks and employ the drivers, whereas in Spain, we contract with independent carriers. We use a blended model in France. The independent carrier relationships are supported by our terminals and staff.
Our LTL team is laser-focused onon-time, damage-free performance. We’re a top three LTL provider in the US, with a network that covers 99% of all zip codes. Using one of the industry’s most modern fleets, we deliver approximately 20 billion pounds of freight a year. We have approximately 20,000 LTL customers, and we’ve significantly increased the number of salespeople dedicated to serving and growing this base.
In North American LTL, in the fourth quarter 2018, we realized an improvement of 260 basis points in adjusted operating ratio to 87.3%%, our best fourth quarter ratio in our history. We’ve brought our LTL operation a long way forward since we acquired the business in late October 2015. LTL is on track to generate over $1 billion of EBITDA for us over the next couple of years.
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