Four Freight Giants Just Reported the Same Metric — Under Four Different Names

A small disagreement broke out on LinkedIn last week about DSV's Q2 2026 results. One side congratulated them on a 37.9% "conversion ratio" in forwarding and called anything higher nonsense. The other side had posted 43%. Here's the thing: both numbers are real — they're just different years. DSV's Air & Sea conversion ratio was 37.9% for the first half of 2026, down from 43.1% a year earlier. The quarter alone was 42.4%, up from 40.8% in Q2 2025 — Air & Sea's first increase since the Schenker integration started.

None of this is new. What's new is the density. Over fourteen days this earnings season — July 22 to August 4 — four of the largest freight companies that keep score this way reported results, and every one of them used this same metric. They just call it different things.

One metric, four names

Sources: DSV H1 2026 interim report · C.H. Robinson Q2 2026 earnings release · Expeditors Q2 2026 results · Kuehne+Nagel Q2 2026 results

Strip the labels, and it's the same formula: operating profit divided by gross profit. Of every dollar of gross profit your team generates, how many cents survive your own cost structure and reach operating profit?

Two things worth knowing before you compare these line by line. The numerators aren't built the same way: DSV strips special items, C.H. Robinson strips restructuring, and Expeditors' 32.2% is unadjusted — it carries a $25 million restructuring charge and a $16 million property-sale gain inside it. And the denominators differ too. Expeditors doesn't publish a gross-profit line or a formula for "operating efficiency" at all; their number works out to operating income over revenue less directly related cost of transportation and other expenses.

Forwarders don't set carrier rates. This ratio is the part they actually control — which is exactly why it's the number the giants manage themselves by, and the number their investors ask about.

What good looks like

McKinsey's 2022 analysis of forwarder economics put typical conversion at 20–30% of what's left after they pay the carrier. The scoreboard above doesn't show one number. It shows a spread — from 17% to 42.4% — and the spread is the point.

DSV's Air & Sea division and C.H. Robinson's NAST are both above 40%. Five figures sit in the 30s: C.H. Robinson at 35.7% consolidated and 33.4% in Global Forwarding, Expeditors at 32.2%, Kuehne+Nagel's Air Logistics at 31%, and DSV at the group level at 30.8%. Kuehne+Nagel's Sea Logistics is at 29% — the top edge of McKinsey's typical band. Kuehne+Nagel's whole-company rate is 17%.

Same industry. Same quarter. More than 25 points of range. Scale isn't what separates them.

C.H. Robinson carries the strongest version of this story: it hit its mid-cycle margin targets in both divisions while the Cass Freight Shipment Index declined year-over-year for the fifteenth consecutive quarter, down 3.3% in Q2 alone — a streak C.H. Robinson counts off the Cass data in its own release. That's margin expansion earned in the trough of the freight cycle, not handed to them by it.

DSV's 42.4% is a different shape. The quarter is up year-over-year and up sequentially — a genuine turn. But the half-year is still down about 520 basis points from last year's first half. Strong number, rebound quarter.

What actually drives conversion

This is where the quarter got interesting, because the giants also told us how the number moves. Productivity is the driver they talk about most. It isn't the only one working.

C.H. Robinson is the clean case. Company-wide average headcount fell 10.8% year-over-year, and NAST volume still grew about 1.5% against a market down 3.3% — the thirteenth consecutive quarter of outgrowing the market. Global Forwarding productivity improved more than 15% in the quarter. Across both divisions, productivity is up more than 60% since the end of 2022, which the company credits to what it calls its Lean AI strategy — and which its chief strategy and innovation officer says runs on hundreds of AI agents trained to specific jobs across the shipment lifecycle. In Q2 that produced a 96% incremental operating margin: 96 cents of every new dollar of adjusted gross profit fell through to adjusted operating income. That's cost structure, not rate luck.

Kuehne+Nagel showed the forward-looking version. They expect annualized productivity benefits of CHF 100–150 million by the end of 2027 — a gross figure, their CFO said on the call, because they don't yet know what AI services will cost them in 2027. The scope is more than 25,000 white-collar roles carrying about CHF 1.7 billion in cost, where they project 5% productivity gain. Don't multiply those two together and expect the headline: 5% of CHF 1.7 billion is CHF 85 million. Kuehne+Nagel builds the range off first-half run-rate figures, and says the benefit can arrive by handling more volume at today's cost rather than by cutting cost. They also decline to credit AI alone — their word is that AI, workflow standardisation and centralisation, and software development gains are combined and inseparable. Their Air Logistics EBIT rose 35% in the quarter, on net turnover up 20%. Volume and mix are doing real work there.

Expeditors posted 32.2% operating efficiency — above the 30% historical target they named in their own Q1 2026 release. Two things sit inside that number: a $25 million pretax restructuring charge on their Global Technology team drags it down, and a $16 million gain on the sale of an underutilized property pushes it back up. Strip both and you get about 33.0%.

Be precise about what that restructuring was, because it's easy to read wrong. Expeditors said it was not driven by cost reduction. They still expect it to take roughly $50 million a year out of the cost base — close to 10% of total corporate overhead — but the headcount reduction lands mostly in Q3. Second-quarter headcount was essentially flat against Q1. So 32.2% is what they did with the people they already had, before any of the cuts show up. Revenue was up 32%, led by airfreight on both higher volumes and higher rates — that's doing part of the work too.

Productivity is the lever the giants point to. Rates, volume and mix are in every one of these numbers as well — and for DSV and Kuehne+Nagel, so is M&A.

How this applies to your business

Here's the part that matters if you run a forwarding operation of twenty, forty, or a hundred people: both halves of this equation are computable today, from data you already have.

Files per operator per month — your version of C.H. Robinson's shipments per person per day. Total shipments handled in a month, divided by operations headcount. This is your productivity number.

Operating profit ÷ gross profit — your conversion ratio, straight off your P&L. This is your scoreboard number. Under 20%: below the typical band McKinsey found in 2022 — and where Kuehne+Nagel's whole-company rate sits. 20–30%: typical. 30–40%: strong, and where five of this quarter's published figures landed. 40%+: DSV's Air & Sea division and C.H. Robinson's NAST.

Most forwarders have never calculated either. That's not a criticism — nobody sends you a benchmark. DSV and Kuehne+Nagel have published these ratios for years; DSV's own table shows Air & Sea at 40.8% a year ago. What's unusual is four of them landing inside two weeks, with divisional detail, so you can finally line them up side by side.

Why patchwork systems leak efficiency margin

If the formula is this simple, why doesn't everyone just improve it? Because the ratio is a measure of your operating architecture. Every re-keyed booking, every reconciliation between systems that don't talk, every spreadsheet bridging your rate tool and your accounting, is gross profit leaking out before it converts. The giants said this part themselves, in almost the same words: Kuehne+Nagel credits owning its TMS for enabling deeper AI integration; C.H. Robinson's chief strategy and innovation officer credits proprietary data, deep logistics expertise, and an engineered context layer he says cannot be purchased or built overnight. AI compounds on connected architecture. It has nowhere to plug into a patchwork.

We're tracking this all earnings season

More forwarders report in the coming weeks, and as last week's LinkedIn disagreement showed, the real figures get flattened fast once they circulate secondhand — two true numbers from two different periods can start a fight all by themselves. We're checking each one against what the company actually filed and sending the accurate read to anyone who wants it.

Know your number

In thirty minutes, we can help you compute your number. Bring your shipment counts and your P&L — we'll compute your files-per-operator and your conversion ratio together, show you where you sit against the published benchmarks, and map where a connected platform changes them.

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