Crane re-enters cargo arena

Jim Crane, who lost a bitter attempt last year to acquire freight forwarder Eagle Global Logistics and take it private after founding and leading it as chairman and chief executive officer for 24 years, announced Thursday he is starting his own non-asset-based logistics company.

Crane Worldwide Logistics will be based in Houston, as was Eagle, with offices in 40 countries. Crane confidently declared that he expects to hire more than 4,000 employees and generate more than $1 billion in revenue during the next five to seven years. The revenue statement comes to about $150 million to $200 million per year, prior to backing out any pass through for purchased transportation.

Crane, who is backing the firm with his own investment firm, Crane Capital, said he will serve as chairman and John Magee will be CEO. Keith Winters will be chief operating officer.

The new venture will start business in mid-August, when Crane's one-year non-compete agreement with CEVA Logistics expires. Eagle shareholders in August 2007 approved the takeover of the company by private equity group Apollo Management for about $2 billion.

Apollo-CEVA won a bidding war for EGL with a management consortium led by Crane and two investment groups. EGL's board originally agreed to let the Crane consortium take the company private, but Apollo countered with its own offer after several large shareholders complained the company accepted the Crane deal too quickly.

EGL paid Crane, the company's largest shareholder, and his investors, a $30 million fee for terminating the original agreement.

Apollo combined Eagle with the contract logistics division it acquired from Dutch postal group TNT to create CEVA Logistics, a powerful global third-party logistics provider.

Magee is a former senior vice president at Eagle, whose areas of responsibility included Central America. Winters was chief administrative officer and before that an executive vice president with the company. The press release announcing the new company was unusual because it did not mention any background information about Magee and Winter nor their previous employment with Eagle.

The release also did not mention whether Crane had any other investment partners.

Source: American Shipper