Expeditors International of Washington EXPD
Industrials · Integrated Freight & Logistics · Synthos Deep Dive · 2026-07-03
The Overview
Expeditors is a freight middleman. It doesn't own planes or ships — it books space on other people's planes and ships for companies that need to move goods around the world, handles the customs paperwork, and takes a cut. Because it owns almost no heavy equipment, it's very profitable and rarely loses money, even in bad years. It has quietly bought back a huge chunk of its own stock for decades, which lifts the value of each remaining share.
The catch: this is a mature, slow-growing business, and the stock isn't cheap. You're paying about 28 dollars for every 1 dollar of yearly profit — a premium price — for a company whose profit is only expected to grow a few percent a year. Wall Street's own average price target ($154) is actually below today's price ($168). So our verdict is Watch: a great company, but wait for a better price.
Here's what our three scores mean in everyday terms:
- Downside Risk 4/10 (fairly safe, but not cheap). The company is financially rock-solid with more cash than debt, and its stock is steady — but it's priced high for its growth, and freight demand rises and falls with the economy.
- Growth Quality 5/10 (middling). It is superbly run and very profitable, but it simply doesn't grow much — a few percent a year.
- Exponential Potential 2/10 (low). This is a steady, mature workhorse, not a company that could multiply in size. Don't expect fireworks.
The one big worry: freight is cyclical. When world trade slows — a recession, a trade war, a tariff shock — the volume of goods shipped drops, and Expeditors' revenue and profit drop with it.
Putting a number on it: our fair-value estimate is $158 against a current price of $190.97 — a premium price for a business we still like.
Our summary metrics
Fortress balance sheet (net cash), but 28× trailing on ~3% EPS growth and cyclical freight demand.
Elite ROE 37%/ROIC 28% & margin discipline — but only ~3-4% forward revenue/EPS CAGR.
Mature, non-asset forwarder; ~4% growth and decelerating. No exponential leg — value-compounder, not multibagger.
What does “fair value” mean?
Fair value is Synthos’s estimate of what one share is worth today, based on our model of the company’s future cash generation and the risks to it. It is not a price target or a prediction of where the stock trades next quarter — it’s the price where we think risk and reward are balanced. Above it, you’re paying for outcomes better than our base case; below it, the market is offering a margin of safety.
The model’s inputs and weightings are proprietary — they’re the product. What we publish is the output, plus an independent, public-math cross-check further down the page (“Check our number”) so you can judge it for yourself.
What do the 5 tiers mean? (Core · Tactical · Watch · Hold · Avoid)
Exponential Potential
Mature, non-asset forwarder; ~4% growth and decelerating. No exponential leg — value-compounder, not multibagger.
What could take this further than the base case — and where the market may be underpricing it. Full forward-growth and acceleration math in Deeper analysis, §4 below.
Deeper analysis
Technicals, fundamentals, valuation, and the full expert-claim evidence panel — the detail behind the numbers above.
Reference table
| Street consensus | $154 (high $175 / low $142; 0 Strong Buy · 4 Buy · 20 Hold · 9 Sell — "Hold") — context, not our anchor; note consensus sits below the current price |
| Valuation | 28× trailing EPS · ~25× FY26E · ~24× FY27E · ~24× FY28E · EV/S 1.9× · EV/EBITDA 18× |
| Technicals | Uptrend — $167.57 at the 52-wk high, above 50/200-DMA, RSI 52 (not overbought), +42% 12-mo (SPY +21%) |
| Conviction | Low — 0 expert voices in the Synthos KB; call rests entirely on fundamentals + quant |
| Position sizing | Not a flagship buy at this price; a watch-list quality name to own on a pullback |
What the experts actually said
No independent expert claims in the Synthos knowledge base yet for EXPD — this dive is fundamentals- and technicals-driven, not panel-driven.
Price & moving averages 12 months · 50 & 200-day averages · 52-week range
Solid line = price · dashed line = 50-day average · dotted line = 200-day average · the two thin horizontal lines mark the 52-week high and low. Price above both averages is an uptrend.
Data summary: last close $190.97, 9% above the 50-day average ($176), 21% above the 200-day average ($158) — an uptrend. 0% below the 52-week high of $191, 69% above the 52-week low of $113.
Bollinger Bands 20-day average ± 2 standard deviations
The shaded band widens when the stock gets more volatile. Riding the upper edge = strong momentum (sometimes stretched); the lower edge = weak / potentially oversold.
Data summary: price $190.97 is currently inside the band (band $174–$195).
RSI (14) momentum gauge · 0–100
Above 70 (overbought zone, shaded) = overbought, below 30 (oversold zone, shaded) = oversold. Currently 70.
MACD 12 / 26 / 9 · trend & momentum
The MACD line crossing above the signal line (bars flip to the up color) = momentum turning up; crossing below (bars flip to the down color) = turning down. Bar height = the size of that gap.
Data summary: MACD is currently above its signal line by 0.24, positive momentum.
Relative performance vs S&P 500 & its sector (XLI (sector)), set to 100 a year ago
Solid = EXPD · dashed = S&P 500 · dotted = XLI (sector). A rising line means it is beating that benchmark — the sector line shows whether it is a leader or laggard within its own group.
Forward revenue & earnings actual → estimate · "FY" = fiscal year, "E" = estimate
Darker bars = actual results, brighter = analyst estimates. Taller bars to the right = expected growth.
Key stats an RIA wants
1. What it is
Expeditors International (NYSE: EXPD) is a Seattle-area, non-asset-based global logistics and supply-chain company founded in 1979. It arranges air freight and ocean freight (as a consolidator or airline agent), and provides customs brokerage, order management, warehousing/distribution, and trade-compliance consulting. Critically, it owns no aircraft or vessels — it buys transportation capacity and resells it with services layered on top, which is why its margins and returns on capital are so high and its capital intensity so low. It serves retail, wholesale, electronics/technology, and industrial/manufacturing customers. Fiscal year ends December 31; ~19,200 employees across 171 district offices on six continents.
Revenue mix (FY2025, from filings):
- By service: Customs Brokerage & Other Services $4.27B (39%) · Airfreight $3.98B (36%) · Ocean Freight & Ocean Services $2.81B (25%). The shift is telling: customs/other is now the largest segment and the growth engine (tariff complexity is a tailwind), while ocean has been the soft spot on weak pricing.
- By geography: United States $3.58B (32%) · North Asia $2.74B (25%) · Europe $2.47B (22%) · South Asia $1.56B · Other N. America $0.47B · Latin America $0.26B. Roughly two-thirds of revenue is generated outside the US, with a heavy Asia-export orientation — which makes trans-Pacific trade policy a direct swing factor.
Note the whipsaw in the top line: revenue was $17.1B in 2022 (freight-rate super-spike), collapsed to $9.3B in 2023, and has rebuilt to $11.1B in 2025. That is the cyclicality of the business in one line — the rate environment, not just volume, drives reported revenue. Gross-revenue-minus-transportation ("net revenue") is the steadier tell, and it is what the buyback-driven EPS story rides on.
2. The expert thesis
There is no expert coverage of EXPD in the Synthos knowledge base. total_claims = 0; zero net-bullish and zero cautionary voices. Unlike names where we can lean on a distilled panel of independent analysts, this verdict is entirely fundamentals- and quant-driven, and we flag that plainly rather than manufacture conviction. No claim_id values exist to cite, so none are cited. The honest read: EXPD is a well-understood, widely-followed industrial where the sell-side consensus is already neutral-to-cautious (Hold; 9 Sell ratings), and our own work below lands in the same neighborhood.
3. Synthos scores & the Bull / Base / Bear cases
The one-glance judgment — three scores, 0–10, each anchored to real metrics (not probabilities we can't honestly calibrate):
| Score | 0–10 | The read |
|---|---|---|
| Downside Risk (lower = safer) | 4 · Moderate-low | Net cash (net-debt/EBITDA −0.6×), beta ~1.0, dividend well-covered, and a proven counter-cyclical margin model — but 28× trailing on ~3% growth, and freight is cyclical. Not a fragile balance sheet; a full valuation. |
| Growth Quality | 5 · Middling | Elite returns (ROE 37%, ROIC 28%, ROCE 39%) and margin discipline, but only ~4% forward revenue CAGR and ~2–3% EPS CAGR (buyback-assisted). Superbly run, structurally slow. |
| Exponential Potential | 2 · Low | A mature, non-asset forwarder in a low-growth category; forward growth is low-single-digit and decelerating. No accelerating leg, no adjacency that changes the size of the company. Value-compounder, not multibagger. |
The three cases (our own scenario model — assumptions shown; each target is a ~12–18-month fair value). We deliberately do not attach probabilities: the base case is the expected path, so a weighted blend would just restate it with false precision. The cases bound the range; the scores above summarize them.
| Case | Key assumptions | Fair value |
|---|---|---|
| Bull | Tariff-complexity/customs tailwind persists, air demand from tech/hyperscalers stays strong, ocean pricing recovers; FY27E EPS beats to ~$7.30 and the market pays a premium ~27× for the quality + buyback. | ~$195 (+16%) |
| Base (our anchor) | Estimates roughly hit — FY27E EPS ~$6.84; a high-quality but slow grower earns a ~23× multiple (a modest de-rate from 28× toward its growth rate + buyback yield). | ~$158 (−6%) |
| Bear | Freight-cycle downturn / trade-war volume shock; FY27E EPS slips to ~$6.00 and the multiple compresses to ~20× as growth stalls. | ~$120 (−28%) |
Synthos fair value = the base case, ~$158 (−6%), with the full $120–$195 span as the honest range. Our base sits essentially on top of the Street's $154 consensus — both say the stock is roughly fairly-to-fully valued here, with the current $167.57 price slightly ahead of fair value. This is a tracked call — the Forecaster Scorecard grades it once it matures.
4. Exponential Potential
Synthos separates compounders (durable high returns on capital) from exponentials (accelerating, multi-baggers-from-here). EXPD is a high-quality compounder with essentially no exponential leg:
- Forward growth: revenue CAGR FY25→FY28E ~4.4% ($11.07B → $12.60B); EPS CAGR ~2–3% ($5.97 → ~$7.10E), where a chunk of even that thin EPS growth comes from the share count shrinking (135.8M FY25 vs 149M FY23) rather than operating growth.
- Acceleration (the 2nd derivative): flat-to-negative. Revenue growth was +4.4% FY25; consensus has ~+5% FY26E, then decelerating to ~+3% FY27E and ~+5% FY28E — no inflection, just a mature grinder. The 2022 super-cycle ($17B) was a rate spike that has fully unwound.
- Room to run: the global freight-forwarding TAM is large, but EXPD is a share-taker in a fragmented, low-growth, competitive market (DSV, Kuehne+Nagel, DHL, C.H. Robinson). There is no adjacency here that re-bases the size of the company — this is not a platform story.
- Reinvestment runway: deliberately low capex (capex/revenue ~0.5%). Management returns cash rather than reinvesting for growth — appropriate for the business, but it means the compounding is buyback- and dividend-driven, not organic-growth-driven.
Exponential Potential: Low (2/10). Own EXPD for what it is — a superbly-run, cash-generative quality name that buys back its own stock — not for growth. A small, accelerating name would score 8–9 here; EXPD is the deliberate opposite.
5. Financials (real numbers — FMP annual/quarterly)
- Revenue: FY25 $11.07B, +4.4% (FY24 $10.60B; FY23 $9.30B). Context: FY22 was $17.1B at the freight-rate peak — reported revenue is rate-sensitive and cyclical, so read net revenue and operating income, not gross revenue.
- Quarterly trajectory: Q1'25 $2.67B → Q2 $2.65B → Q3 $2.89B → Q4 $2.86B → Q1'26 $2.78B (+4.4% YoY). Steady, not accelerating.
- Margins: gross 20.2% TTM, operating ~9.7% TTM, net 7.5% TTM. (Freight-forwarder gross margin optically depends on gross-vs-net revenue presentation; the durable tell is that operating income has held up — FY25 operating income $1.05B, roughly flat with FY24's $1.04B despite the rate cycle.)
- Earnings: net income $813.8M FY25 (essentially flat vs FY24 $810M); EPS $5.97 (+3.8% on FY24 $5.75) — EPS grew faster than net income because of buybacks. Q1'26 EPS $1.71, +16% YoY (a strong, tariff-complexity-aided quarter).
- Returns on capital (the crown jewel): ROE 36.7%, ROIC 28.2%, ROCE 39.5%, ROA 17.5% — elite for any industrial, a direct product of the asset-light model.
- Cash flow: operating CF $1.01B FY25, capex just −$53M, FCF $953M (FCF margin ~8.6%, FCF conversion ~94% of operating CF). Nearly all of it is returned to shareholders.
- Balance sheet: net cash — cash $1.31B vs only $571M of (capitalized-lease) debt, net debt −$744M, net-debt/EBITDA −0.6×. Current ratio 1.8×. A fortress.
6. Valuation — priced in or room?
EXPD is not cheap and not egregiously expensive — it is full. Trailing 28× EPS, 18× EV/EBITDA, 1.9× sales. The problem is the denominator's growth rate: paying ~28× for a business compounding EPS at ~3% implies a rich PEG. On live consensus the forward multiple barely compresses — ~25× FY26E → ~24× FY27E → ~24× FY28E — because the E is nearly flat. A quality-and-buyback premium justifies some of this (the market rightly pays up for 37% ROE and a shrinking share count), but there is little valuation cushion.
Street targets (context, not our anchor): consensus $154, median $153, high $175, low $142 — the consensus and even the high target ($175) leave little upside from $167.57, and the average target sits below the current price. The grade distribution is telling: 0 Strong Buy, 4 Buy, 20 Hold, 9 Sell → consensus Hold. FMP's letter rating is B+ (weakest sub-scores: P/E and P/B — i.e. valuation). Our base FV of ~$158 lands right on top of the Street. Conclusion: a quality-at-full-price name — wait for a better entry.
7. Technicals (from the tech block)
- Trend: up. $167.57 sits above the 50-DMA ($157.61) and 200-DMA ($146.23), with the 50 above the 200 (golden-cross posture). MACD +1.83 (positive).
- Location: at the 52-week high ($167.57; the stock is 0% off its high) and +50% off the 52-week low ($111.37) — a name pushing new highs with, by definition, zero drawdown from peak.
- Momentum: RSI(14) 52.5 — neutral, not overbought (well below 70). Despite being at highs, momentum is not stretched.
- Relative strength: EXPD +42.0% 12-mo vs SPY +20.6% and QQQ +30.3% — strong outperformance of the market over the year, though it has lagged QQQ over 3- and 6-months (+16% vs SPY +14%, QQQ +22% over 3-mo).
- Read: the chart is healthy and the momentum is not overheated, but the stock is at an all-time-high area with the fundamentals fairly valued and the Street's target below spot — technicals give no urgency to chase; a pullback toward the rising 50-DMA (~$158) would line up with our base fair value.
8. Moat & competitive position
EXPD's moat is operational, not structural: a decades-honed, non-asset-based model with a distinctive branch-level profit-sharing compensation culture that aligns employees to unitary profitability, a proprietary integrated IT/network across 171 offices, and deep customs/trade-compliance expertise that is getting more valuable as tariffs and trade complexity rise. The evidence is in the returns — sustained ~30–40% ROE/ROCE is not achievable without a real edge. But it is a share-of-a-commodity-flow moat, not a pricing-power monopoly: forwarding is fragmented and competitive, and larger asset-light peers (DSV, Kuehne+Nagel) have scaled aggressively via M&A while EXPD grows organically.
Peer set (FMP-supplied, market cap): the direct forwarding/logistics comps are C.H. Robinson $22.4B (the closest peer) and J.B. Hunt $27.0B; XPO $24.2B and ZTO Express $18.3B round out transport. The rest of the FMP peer list are same-market-cap industrials rather than true business comps — AECOM $8.7B, Lennox $19.8B, MasTec $29.5B, Pentair $12.4B, Snap-on $21.3B, TransUnion $15.1B. Against C.H. Robinson, EXPD carries the higher-quality balance sheet and returns; against the group, it is the "quality at a premium multiple" option.
9. Management, capital allocation & guidance
- Capital allocation (the standout): disciplined and shareholder-friendly for decades. FY25 returned ~$667M via buybacks + $207M dividends = ~$874M, i.e. more than the year's $813M net income, funded by FCF and the net-cash balance sheet. Share count fell from 149M (FY23) → 141M (FY24) → 135.8M (FY25) — a ~9% two-year reduction that is the EPS-growth engine. Dividend is modest (~$1.58/yr, ~0.9% yield, ~25% payout) and well-covered. Capex is deliberately minimal (~0.5% of revenue).
- Insider activity: the most recent Form 4s (2026-06-15/17) are routine RSU dividend-equivalent awards to the CEO (Daniel R. Wall) and other officers — grants, not open-market buys or discretionary sales. No signal either way.
- Management's own guidance (half-weighted — their own words): EXPD does not issue numeric revenue/EPS guidance (long-standing policy). The Q1'26 earnings release (SEC 8-K, 2026-05-05) is qualitative and notably cautious: CEO Daniel Wall expects "the freight environment to remain highly unpredictable," with "the air market … facing rapid shifts in capacity, routing, pricing, and possible fuel shortages" and "the ocean market … impacted by abundant capacity and weak pricing." The offset they flag: a "strong pipeline of new business" and "robust demand for our customs brokerage services due to elevated tariff-driven complexity." CFO David Hackett highlighted hitting the "30% historical [operating-efficiency] target" and productivity gains from AI/technology investments with headcount held flat. Net: management is guiding to resilience and cost discipline in a soft, uncertain freight market — not to growth. Treat as self-interested framing, half-weighted; the tone reinforces the low-growth base case.
10. Catalysts & what to watch
- Next earnings: 2026-08-04 (Q2'26; Street EPS $1.65, revenue ~$2.84B). Watch customs/other revenue growth (the tariff-complexity tailwind) and ocean pricing/volume (the drag), plus buyback pace.
- Tariff & trade policy: a double-edged sword — near-term it boosts customs-brokerage demand (complexity = fees), but a severe trade-war volume shock would cut air/ocean tonnage. The single biggest macro swing factor.
- Air-freight demand from tech/hyperscalers: cited by management as a current strength; a durable AI/electronics shipping cycle would support the bull case.
- Ocean-rate recovery: ocean has been the soft spot on overcapacity; a rate turn would help reported revenue.
- Buyback cadence & share count: since buybacks are the EPS growth, watch the pace of repurchases relative to the (full) share price.
Thesis tripwires (what would change the call): a meaningful valuation reset toward ~20× on a freight-cycle scare (would flip us more constructive on price); two-plus quarters of volume contraction across air and ocean; or an acceleration signal (sustained double-digit net-revenue growth) that would justify re-rating the growth score up.
11. Key risks
- Cyclicality (structural): freight forwarding tracks global trade volumes and rates. The FY22→FY23 revenue halving ($17.1B → $9.3B) is the live illustration; a recession or trade shock hits volumes and rates together.
- Valuation / de-rating: 28× trailing on ~3% EPS growth, with the Street's average target below spot — limited margin for a demand or pricing disappointment.
- Tariff/trade-policy whiplash: a tailwind for customs fees but a tail-risk for volumes; policy is unpredictable.
- Ocean overcapacity & weak pricing: management's own flagged soft spot; a persistent drag on one-quarter of revenue.
- Growth scarcity: the business simply doesn't grow much organically; the return depends on continued buybacks and margin defense, both of which are finite levers.
- No expert coverage: with zero Synthos KB voices, the call rests solely on fundamentals/quant — lower conviction than a panel-backed name (an honesty flag, not a business flaw).
12. Verdict, position sizing & monitoring
Watch. Expeditors is a genuinely high-quality business — 37% ROE, 28% ROIC, net cash, a fortress balance sheet, and one of the most shareholder-friendly buyback records in the S&P 500. But quality is not the question; price and growth are. At $167.57 the stock trades at ~28× trailing earnings for a business compounding EPS at ~3% (much of it buyback-assisted), it sits at its 52-week high, and even the Street's average target ($154) and our base fair value (~$158) are below the current price. There is no expert conviction in our KB to override that math. This is a name to own on weakness, not to chase at highs.
- Sizing: not a flagship buy at this level. A watch-list quality name — build a position on a pullback toward the low-$150s / rising 50-DMA (which aligns with our ~$158 base FV), where the risk/reward turns favorable.
- Monitoring: re-underwrite on the tripwires in §10; formal re-score each earnings print. A freight-cycle scare that resets the multiple toward ~20× would be the setup to get constructive. This verdict is logged as a tracked Synthos call as of 2026-07-03 at $167.57.
- Single biggest risk: a freight-cycle downturn or trade-war volume shock compressing both volumes and the customs tailwind.
Provenance & disclosures
- Traceability: 0 KB claims — EXPD has no expert coverage in the Synthos knowledge base. The verdict is fundamentals- and quant-driven, with no
claim_ids to cite (and none fabricated). Fabricated conviction is structurally impossible (claim-ID reconciliation). - Data as-of: fundamentals 2026-03-31 (Q1'26) · estimates & prices 2026-07-03 · no expert claims. Forward figures are analyst consensus (FMP), labeled as estimates.
- Management caveat: the §9 guidance summary is management's own earnings-release language (SEC 8-K, 2026-05-05), self-interested and half-weighted by design; EXPD issues no numeric guidance.
- Not investment advice. Independent research, educational and informational only, never personalized. Hypothetical/forward figures are labeled; the only performance numbers Synthos will headline are the live, real-money Flagship's.
- Version: 2026-07-03. Prior versions available via the deep-dive version dropdown ("based on the info at the time").