J. B. Hunt

J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc. is the largest truckload carrier in the United States. Since the passage of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which essentially deregulated the trucking industry, the company has grown to become the nation's leader in providing irregular route trucking services--meaning that it picks up cargo and delivers it wherever the customer wants instead of relying on established routes&mdashø businesses such as Wal-Mart, its largest customer. J.B. Hunt loads most its 17,000 trailers and 7,000 trucks with general commodities: its principal types of freight include foodstuffs, plastics and plastic products, general retail store merchandise, chemicals, paper and paper products, and manufacturing materials and supplies. While the familiar yellow and black J.B. Hunt logo is still most likely to be found on trucks travelling throughout the contiguous 48 states, the company has added new forms of transportation and extended its services to foreign markets, while increasing its capability to haul special kinds of freight. Among the company's many areas of growth initiated in the late 1980s, its foray into the intermodal service market was perhaps the most significant. Expected to generate nearly half of the company's total revenues by 1995, this hybrid form of transportation unified trucks, railroads, and sometimes cargo ships into one transportation system, so that shippers did not have to pack and unpack their cargo each time the mode of transit changed. J.B. Hunt has diversified into several other important areas of specialization as well, expanding its repertoire of services to include third party logistics management, hazardous waste and materials transportation, flatbed trailer services, and intrastate freight hauling. Through a joint venture with Mexico's largest transportation company and an alliance with Canada's largest railroad, J.B. Hunt has been able to offer its customers seamless service across both borders since the early 1990s. An industry leader in customer service, driver safety, and innovative technology, J.B. Hunt has become one of the ten largest trucking companies of any kind in the United States, surpassing the $1 billion mark in revenues for the first time in 1993. In 1969, one of Hunt's customers complained about the service he was receiving from the trucking company that hauled his dressed chickens and encouraged Hunt to buy the trucker's five tractors and seven refrigerated trailers and take over the contract. J.B. Hunt Transport was born; the former driver was now an owner. As had been the case with his former ventures, though, the early years of his trucking business were not profitable. Looking for a way to expand his fledgling trucking company, Hunt tried to gain entrance into the dry goods segment of the industry, obtaining an authorization to do so from an Atlanta company in 1971. At that time, however, the strict Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) regulations imposed heavy costs on those attempting to enter new markets. Seven years later, on the brink of giving up his money-losing trucking business, Hunt listened to the advice of Paul Bergant, a Chicago lawyer, who later became the head of J.B. Hunt's marketing division and chief legal counsel. Bergant convinced Hunt that deregulation was imminent. Hunt followed Bergant's intuition and expanded his operations, purchasing a trucking company that added 24 trucks and ICC licenses covering 33 states to his business. Knowing that in a deregulated environment the high operating costs of his old-line competitors, who relied heavily on the expensive services of independent truck owner/operators, would no longer be protected by ICC barriers to competition, he looked for ways to increase the efficiency of his own operation. His strategy was simple: replace privately owned and operated rigs with his own nonunion drivers and equipment; lower fuel costs (which generally consumed 16 percent of trucking revenues) by offering monthly incent