The National Freight Index (NFI) is a comprehensive barometer of the container road freight spot market in India. NFI offers an aggregated picture of both live rates and historical trends of spot price movements in the road freight industry. The index is represented in two main forms, firstly in terms of actual freight rates for lanes and secondly in terms of relative movement with respect to the base month of Jan 2022.

Rivigo has been solving pressing issues in the traditionally broker led road freight marketplace of the country in two ways. First, by bringing price transparency to fleet owners and transporters through the National Freight Index. Before this there was no single platform to view freight prices and transact on more than 50,000+ lanes (origin, destination pairs) in the country. Secondly, by providing no hassles, assured supply of container trucks on these lanes.

Until now, there was no aggregate measure of the movement of spot prices in the road freight market in the country. Through National Freight Index (NFI), we solve this problem.

The National freight Index provides current and historic trends at the following level-

• Vehicle type: Container
• Vehicle sub-type: 32 ft MXL (more vehicle types will be added soon)
• Lanes: Interzonal rates between all origin/destinations in a 300 km radius from/to the major trucking nodes – Delhi, Ambala, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai

Depending on the use case and the network footprint that interests you, you can choose any level of granularity.

NFI can serve many purposes across user groups. Sample use cases could be for:

• Transporters (Demand side users)

  1. The Freight Index provides never before visibility in the changing price trends
  2. The Freight Index helps transporters to source spot trucks at the best rates
  3. Provide an insight into overall changing industry trends, allowing them to price their business in line with the trends
  4. See transparent pricing and book trucks from Rivigo at these rates

• Fleet Owners (Supply side users)

  1. Fleet owners can use the NFI to price their spot deals
  2. They can consider the rates across different lanes to optimise their fleet mix on these lanes to maximise returns
  3. Use historic patterns to analyse their past deals and identify opportunities for right-pricing existing customers
  4. Get a sense of return rates beforehand to allow them to price their forward routes effectively

• For large and medium enterprises who mostly operate on fixed contracts, the NFI will give them a visibility of how their freight bill would have fared had they shifted part of their road freight volumes from fixed to spot rates.

• Research analysts across banking, consulting, public sectors, and academics can use the index as a source of accurate logistics cost and find useful correlations with other macro-indicators.

The freight index leverages the following data sources to arrive at the best spot rates for today-

• Historical prices and daily clearance spot rates for Rivigo operated fleet
• Daily pricing inputs from our network of transporters (demand partners)
• Daily spot inputs from our supply partners
• Daily pricing feedback on key lanes by Rivigo’s sales force working in the top spot markets

These data points are analysed by Rivigo’s pricing algorithm, which leverages the following parameters for each price point-

• Reliability – Confidence level of the price basis clearance rates and market trends
• Seasonal Trends – The algorithm analyses past cyclicity and price trends
• Macro factors – Fuel price movements, toll costs and other input costs.

The National Freight Index provides the following outputs at the below frequencies-

• Daily- Spot Rates for 50,000+ lanes for container vehicles (currently only 32 ft MXL)
• Weekly- Price movement information for 80 high popularity lanes
• Monthly - Historic pricing index for the overall industry

You can use the Rivigo web platform here.