And I believe it’s related to the fact that we’re approaching the — we’re starting the ocean peak season. This is the time when retailers are starting to ship stuff out of Asia to have on the shelf for Thanksgiving or Christmas. So, I think this is the normal sort of seasonal uptick, but it’s good to see that even in the soft market, we are seeing that uptick this year. Some people worry there wouldn’t be that. I think also retail spending is — you may know this better than me, Brian, but retail spending is holding up okay. I’m not saying it’s great, but consumers — despite inflation and other worries, consumer spending has not slowed down too much or not as much as some people fear. So I think overall there’s a feeling in the industry, certainly on the ocean side that we’ve seen the worst.
Having said that, there are still threats. There’s still a backlog of orders for ships, and there’s still planes coming on board. So, there still can be down — more downward pressure on price, even if the volumes are holding up okay.
Brian Dobson: Yes. Thanks. That’s very helpful color. And last month, you rolled out digital interlining on WebCargo. How’s the early feedback been? Has that been positive?
Zvi Schreiber: The early feedback has been excellent. Now, I don’t want to mislead you. I mean, we’re still just doing test shipments, there’s no volume yet to speak of — and that will take many months to get to real volume. But the feedback has been excellent. We have a number of airlines who’ve already signed agreements or negotiating agreements to join that. I mean, you would not believe — if you’re not from the industry, you would not believe how painful it is for airlines right now to do interlining of cargo. And they’re literally — it’s hard to believe, they literally spend a day or two going back and forth by email and phone calls. And actually, there’s a lot less interlining happening than should, because interlining makes perfect sense.
No — there’s no airline who flies everywhere. So interlining should be a very important way of getting cargo across the globe. And yet it’s so painful with the manual process that there is today. So the feedback has been universally excellent. Having said that, things take time with airlines. So I think it will take — I think we’re on our way now. We’ve got good momentum, great feedback, but it will take a good while till it really affects our bottom line.
Eytan Buchman: Our next caller is George Sutton from Craig-Hallum.
George Sutton: So, Zvi, you very quickly went through the new carriers added in the quarter and certain carriers that had expanded. Could you just go through those again real quick?
Zvi Schreiber: Yes, sure. Just pull up my notes so I don’t get it wrong. Yes. So, we mentioned two new ones. One is China Eastern, which is one of the — which is a substantial Asian carrier. Even so we don’t yet have that whole network, it’s rolling out in stages. But that was actually, I said — maybe I sort of misspoke before, because there was one major new airline. Still the exposure will be gradually. Another one is Wideroe, which is a smaller regional Scandinavian airline. But we like that as well. I think it’s really important to have the niche airlines as well, or the niche airlines because that really helps us to provide comprehensive coverage, which is very attractive to the freight forwarders. So those are the two new ones.
Like I say, we’re working hard to bring on some more of the big familiar names that we’re missing. We have many of them. We saw expansion in airlines like Qatar, LATAM, Avianca, and Emirates. So Qatar and Emirates, reminder, those are the two biggest cargo airlines in the world. So, both of them expanded the range. I don’t have permission to say exact details, but they gave us new countries or new products or bigger weight breaks. So it’s very exciting to see that it’s going in the right direction, both with new airlines, but also existing airlines. They like us as a channel and then they come back and say, okay, now we want to put more of a network on WebCargo by Freightos, which is always good to see.
George Sutton: So, I thought the most meaningful comment you made was that you saw 40% growth in your air cargo exports from Europe at a time that the market fell. And I wondered if you could just talk about the digitization of the market, what you are seeing relative to what the market overall is seeing, and I’m looking at sort of a competitive landscape comment from that.
Zvi Schreiber: Okay. Well, if you’re asking in terms of competition, from what we know, we — of course, our competitors are both, our competitors for airline bookings are private companies. So, we don’t see direct — they don’t publish numbers. However, we do often get feedback from the airlines if they choose to share with us, sort of how big we are versus other platforms. Sometimes they choose to share that with us, and then we get some good indications. And the indications are really positive. I think we’ve got a substantial market lead at least from all the data points, I have at least 5x sort of the nearest competitor, which is a very substantial lead when you’re a marketplace, it means we have more liquidity.
And that seems to have held up. That seems to be at least — the lead seems to be at least as big as it was a year ago. So, I’m very, very encouraged that we maintain a very strong leadership position. And as you know, when you’re a marketplace, that’s what it’s all about. If you’ve got the liquidity, then that can be very self-sustaining because the buyers and the sellers come to you because that’s where all the liquidity is. So, yes, feeling good about that.
George Sutton: Perfect. Thank you.
Zvi Schreiber: Thanks, George.
Eytan Buchman: Okay. Well, seeing there are no more questions here, I’d like to thank everybody for joining. A reminder that a recording of this webcast will be available on our website at freightos.com/investors. Thank you everybody for attending. That concludes this call.