"Today, in reality, we are using Excel."
That line, or some version of it, comes up again and again on calls with pharma procurement teams about how they run their ocean freight tenders. Not just at small distributors. Not just at companies short on resources. Major pharma manufacturers, still building tender comparisons by hand, still uploading a master spreadsheet to manage rates across networks that include some of the most temperature-sensitive, highest-value cargo in global trade.
It says something most people assume isn't true: scale doesn't automatically solve the visibility problem in pharma freight. Big companies with sophisticated procurement functions are still, in the specific corner of the business that is freight, working with tools that would look outdated in almost any other category they manage.
That's not just anecdotal. 57% of chemicals and pharmaceutical respondents to Xeneta's 2026 procurement survey cite legacy systems that don't integrate with new tools as one of their biggest process challenges – the widest gap of any sector measured – against a 39% average across all industries.
Every controllable cost is under the microscope, and freight is one of the few left
Pharma is heading into a genuine patent cliff, with an estimated $200 to $400 billion of annual branded revenue exposed to generic and bio-similar competition through to 2030. The first Medicare-negotiated prices under the US Inflation Reduction Act took effect on January 1, 2026, and that program scales up every year. And then there’s the Section 232 tariff, imposing a 100 percent duty on certain patented pharmaceuticals and their active ingredients since July 31, 2026, with the same rate applying to smaller companies from September 29.
None of those pressures are things procurement controls.
Freight is.
In this industry, freight isn't a minor line item: air freight and cold-chain lanes dominate pharma spend more than in almost any other sector Xeneta tracks, because the products are high-value, fragile, and often time-critical enough that premium freight is the default, not the exception.
That reliance on air comes at a bad time. Xeneta's mid-year update to its 2026 Air Freight Outlook shows global air rates running well above where the market expected them to land this year. Combined spot and long-term rates were up 17 percent year-on-year through the first half of 2026, a sharp reversal from a December forecast that had rates falling. Much of that comes down to a mode shift that never happened: ocean disruption tied to the Middle East conflict kept shippers on air instead of letting volume migrate back to sea, which is what the original forecast expected. For an industry this dependent on air, that means higher, stickier rates on top of the tariff and patent-cliff pressure already squeezing margin.
The surcharge stack in pharma is longer than almost anywhere else
Surcharges show up in nearly two thirds of pharma freight conversations we have – among the highest of any industry we track. Fuel surcharges, security surcharges, terminal handling charges, currency adjustment factors, peak-season surcharges, Emissions Trading System costs, war-risk premiums tied to Red Sea routing.... you name it, pharma procurement teams have them stacking on top of their base air or ocean rates. Add cold-chain qualification requirements under Good Distribution Practice and IATA's CEIV Pharma certification, and you get a rate structure that's genuinely hard to audit; even with good tools.
Manual tender management costs more than time
Try managing that complexity in a spreadsheet, updated by hand, shared across a team that also has to track which carriers are cold-chain qualified on which lanes. The people doing this work are plenty capable. The tool has simply stopped matching the complexity of the job. Every carrier bid gets typed in by hand. Every surcharge gets tracked in a separate tab, if it gets tracked at all. When a bid looks competitive, there's no fast way to check it against what other pharma shippers are paying on that same cold-chain lane, so "competitive" ends up meaning "cheaper than our last contract," not "in line with the market."
That comparison gets weaker every month. Xeneta's mid-year Air Freight Outlook found forwarders procuring 49% of air freight volumes on the spot market in Q2 2026, close to levels last seen during the pandemic, while the share of new shipper contracts signed for three months or less more than doubled year-on-year, to 58 percent. When the market itself resets every few months, checking a new bid against last year's contract tells you very little. You need to know what the market is doing right now, not what it was doing when you last signed.
47% of pharma respondents also name rigid annual or fixed-cycle tendering as a top challenge, against a 36% average — a mismatch that only gets sharper as the market itself resets every few months.
Run the same tender against a live benchmark of the underlying air and ocean rates on your cold-chain lanes, with the surcharge stack validated against real contract data, and the comparison changes shape. The check that used to take days of manual cross-referencing happens in the time it takes to open a report.
More importantly, when a bid comes in that looks good but is still above market, that gets caught before the contract is signed, not discovered a year later when someone finally has time to dig through the spreadsheet.
What tender season looks like without the spreadsheet
Your next tender could start with a live view of where the market sits on your specific air and cold-chain lanes, broken out by every surcharge in the stack, checked against real shipper and forwarder contracts instead of a public index or a single forwarder's word. Bids get evaluated against that number in minutes, not days. The question your team asks in every negotiation stops being "does this look better than last year" and becomes "does this match the market," a much stronger position to negotiate from.
Company size was never going to fix this. The tool has to match the complexity of what pharma actually ships.
See what this looks like in practice. Explore Xeneta's Integrated Rate Management (IRM) to replace scattered rate sheets with one auditable, benchmarked system, or see how Xeneta supports pharmaceutical freight procurement across air and cold-chain lanes.
