Dive Brief:
- XPO Logistics named Baris Oran CFO for its soon-to-be spinoff company, GXO Logistics, according to an announcement on Tuesday.
- Oran follows a string of XPO hires, filling out the structure of the contract logistics business. In January, it promoted its European logistics business CEO, Malcolm Wilson, to CEO of GXO. In March, it named its senior vice president of logistics technology, Sandeep Sakharkar, GXO's incoming CIO.
- Because the GXO business model is asset-light, it can generate "significant free cash flow throughout various cycles," Oran said. "We'll be largely independent of macroeconomic conditions, so we'll be able to focus on driving revenue growth and expanding margins right away," he said.
Dive Insight:
Oran will join the company next month. He arrives after five years as CFO of Sabanci Holding, an Istanbul-based investments manager. Prior to that, he was CFO of Turkish textiles manufacturer Kordsa.
"I've been involved in multiple successful [initial public offerings] that helped crystalize shareholder value," Oran told Transport Dive sister publication CFO Dive. "As the chairman of an omnichannel retail company, I oversaw the best performance in the company's 20-year history, thanks to advanced data analytics and an e-commerce expansion."
In the new role and new industry, Oran is excited by the large "addressable opportunity" in the logistics space.
"From day one, GXO will be the second-largest contract logistics company in the world, in a market that's still largely untapped," he said. "One of our biggest priorities will be helping grow GXO's market share. Right now, XPO's logistics business has about 5% of a $130 billion market; we want to grow that after the spinoff."
The spinoff, aimed at boosting both companies' share prices, is expected to close in the second half of 2021, XPO said. At that point, company shareholders will own stock in both XPO and GXO.
"Malcolm and the management team know how to generate incredible shareholder value, and they excel at operational execution and capital allocation," Oran said.
The company benefited from the pandemic-fueled e-commerce boom last year. In the quarter ending December 2020, it reported nearly $4.7 billion in revenue, a 13% YoY increase, which it credited to "rebounded demand from COVID-impacted second quarter lows." The logistics division generated about $6.2 billion in revenue in the 2020 calendar year, up about 1% from the prior year. It accounted for 38% of XPO's revenue last year.
E-commerce is a key area, alongside automation and outsourcing, in which Oran expects GXO to "win," he said.
"I can't stress enough how strong those trends are," Oran told CFO Dive, "and how excited GXO is to capitalize on the tailwinds they've created for us."
