Rivigo launches National Freight Index

Technology-enabled logistics firm Rivigo Thursday launched the National Freight Index (NFI) with an aim to bring transparency and boost efficiency in the market.

The NFI is the barometer of the road freight market in India and is based on Rivigo rate exchange, which gives a live spot rate on over 7 million lane and vehicle type combinations in the country.

The move is aimed at bringing transparency to the road freight market place and transforming the logistics sector.

"In the existing logistics market structure, there are high inefficiencies due to information asymmetry, which leads to a great loss of value. NFI will enable unrestricted access and sharing of freight rate information. This will bring transparency in the market and propel the logistics sector towards efficiencies and growth," GazalKalra, Co-Founder, Rivigo, addressing a press meet here said.

The 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: in terms of actual freight rates condensed to Rupees per tonne-km and in terms of relative movement with respect to a base month, Kalra added.

Both the index and the exchange are based on Rivigo's machine learning and economics powered pricing algorithms, which are continuously improving on accuracy.

The rates on the exchange and index are computed using millions of data points from historical transactions, current market dynamics, micro market insights and other factors - with the ultimate purpose of giving a fair and precise representation of the state of the spot market in the country, Rivigo said in a statement.

It also said that the Indian road freight market for 2018 is estimated to be in the range of USD 150-160 billion and added about USD 130-140 billion of this is the Full Truck Load (FTL) market.

Within this, Rivigo estimates that the spot freight market is about USD 110-130 billion and is growing at about 10 per cent per year, the statement said.

Efficiency of the spot freight marketplace will determine how this growth is compounded and National Freight Index will empower all stakeholders to realise its full potential, it said, adding the NFI can be visited at nationalfreightindex.com.

Rivigo is a technology enabled logistics company, which owns a fleet of over 3,000 trucks.