“Peak season's kind of doing a number on us with our awards.” A medical device shipper said that mid-tender, describing how the timing of their carrier allocation process happened to collide with a seasonal capacity crunch, and how that accident of timing was quietly shaping which carriers won volume, regardless of which carriers actually performed best.
That's a strange way to run a tender.
Carrier allocation should reflect who delivers reliably at a fair price.
Instead, for this shipper and plenty of others, it was partly reflecting whichever week the tender happened to land in. When timing outweighs performance in a process meant to reward performance, something in the process needs fixing.
Tariffs are landing directly on margin, with nowhere else to go
Medical device makers are disproportionately exposed to new tariff pressure. An estimated 62% of medical devices used in the US come from other countries, and nearly 70% of US-marketed devices are manufactured solely outside the country (KPMG). Johnson & Johnson's MedTech division projected a $400 million tariff hit in a single year (MedTech Dive), and industry estimates put the added cost at $2,000 to $8,000 per device in some categories (PTC). Because device pricing is heavily constrained by hospital purchasing agreements and reimbursement structures, that cost has nowhere to go but straight into margin.
At the same time, hospital systems are running median operating margins near zero — down to negative 0.6% in January 2026 (Becker's Hospital Review) — pushing cost containment further upstream onto device suppliers. Every controllable cost line gets scrutinized harder as a result, and freight, especially the air-heavy spend this industry depends on for implants, diagnostics, and urgent replenishment, is one of the few levers procurement still controls.
Air freight carries the highest-stakes cargo in this industry, and general rates don't price it
Air isn't the dominant mode in medtech the way it is in pharma or electronics, where it carries roughly two-thirds of freight. In medical devices, capital equipment and disposables still move mostly by ocean. But air carries the cargo where a delay actually stops something: implants, diagnostics, and urgent replenishment. That's high-value, low-weight freight, often too urgent for ocean transit times, and a delay on these lanes doesn't just mean a late shipment. It can mean a stopped surgical line or a hospital field-service failure.
Surcharges show up in nearly two-thirds of medical device freight conversations we conduct, and they're increasingly stacked on top of tariff and duty costs that are increasingly hard to forecast.
General market rate data rarely prices these specific air lanes at the level of detail medtech procurement needs. That leaves teams negotiating urgent freight with whatever rate a forwarder quotes in the moment, with no independent way to check it.
That gap is opening at a bad time.
Xeneta's own mid-year update to its 2026 Air Freight Outlook shows global air cargo rates running well above where the market expected them to land this year. Combined spot and long-term rates were up 17% year-on-year through the first half of 2026 , reversing a December forecast that had rates falling 5 to 10%. Much of that comes down to a mode shift that never happened: ocean disruption tied to the Middle East conflict kept shippers on air rather than letting them migrate volume back to sea, which is exactly what the original forecast expected. For an industry this air-dependent, that means the rate environment has stayed tight and expensive for longer than anyone predicted, layered directly on top of the tariff pressure already squeezing margin.
When timing decides your tender, performance stops mattering
Go back to the shipper whose awards got skewed by peak-season timing. Without a market view, there was no way to separate “this carrier won because they're genuinely the best performer” from “this carrier won because capacity happened to favor them the week we tendered.” That distinction matters enormously, because a carrier that only looks good due to a timing accident will underperform the moment conditions normalize, and the shipper is stuck with that allocation for the length of the contract.
A shipper with a live benchmark on their specific air and ocean lanes can separate those two things. They can see whether a carrier's rate and reliability during the tender window actually reflects sustained performance or a temporary capacity quirk. That means tender awards go to carriers who perform consistently, not carriers who happened to be favored by a seasonal accident. Over a contract term, that's the gap between a partner who delivers and one who just got lucky once.
That timing risk is bigger than it used to be, and not just for medtech. The same Xeneta outlook found forwarders procuring nearly 50% of air freight volumes on the spot market in the second quarter of 2026, close to the highs last seen during the pandemic, while the share of new shipper contracts signed for three months or less rose to 58%, up from 22% a year earlier (Supply Chain Dive). When that much of the market is being priced in short, volatile windows instead of locked into stable annual terms, the specific week a device maker happens to tender matters more than it used to, not less.
Reliability compounds the same risk. Carrier reliability comes up in more than a third of medtech freight conversations Xeneta has had with shippers this year — because on these lanes, a carrier that's merely on-time most of the time isn't good enough. A missed delivery window on an implant or a field-service part doesn't just cost a day; it costs a procedure or a hospital's ability to treat a patient. Rate benchmarking tells procurement whether the price was fair. Reliability data tells them whether the carrier that won the tender can actually be trusted to make the date, not just the price, every time it matters.
Tariffs you can't fix. Freight you can still manage well.
Nobody in medtech procurement can undo a tariff or reverse hospital margin pressure. What procurement can do is make sure the one lever still in their control, freight, is being managed with realtime, neutral market data instead of accepted on faith. That means benchmarking the air lanes that carry your highest-value products, checking the surcharges stacking on top of new duty costs, and making sure tender awards reflect actual carrier performance rather than the accident of when the tender happened to run.
Teams that put a benchmark in front of the tender typically surface savings worth several multiples of what it costs to get that visibility — often from correcting a single overpriced or unreliable air lane before the contract is signed, not after.
What a tender free of timing luck looks like
Run your next carrier tender with a live view of performance on your actual air and ocean lanes, and the whole exercise stops depending on whatever capacity conditions happen to exist that specific week. Carriers get judged on what they consistently deliver, not on a snapshot that happened to favor whoever had space that month. When a hospital field-service part needs to fly urgently, the rate gets checked against the market in real time, instead of accepted because nobody had time to check.
Tariffs aren't going away, and neither is the margin pressure they're creating. Freight is one of the few places left where procurement still gets to decide whether the number was fair, and whether the carrier that won actually earned it.
Read the 2026 Freight Intelligence Buyers' Guide for the questions every medical device procurement team should ask before their next carrier tender, or see how Xeneta measures carrier performance so tender awards reflect who actually delivers, not who got lucky on timing.
