ABOUT THIS SERVICE · SINCE 2024

Freight news, filtered for the region

RiyadhCargo.com is an independent news monitoring service for the cargo, freight and logistics industry. We track reporting from trade press, wire services and regional outlets around the world, and bring together the stories that matter to one readership: professionals moving goods to, from and through the Middle East — with Saudi Arabia first. The wire has been running in its current, independent form since 2024.

Every headline on this site links directly to the publisher that reported it. We are a reading room, not a rewrite desk: our job is to make sure that when something moves in Jeddah, Dammam, NEOM, Jebel Ali, Suez or Hormuz, you see it on one page — fast.

What we cover

The Kingdom desk follows Saudi ports, freighter fleets, rail corridors, dry ports and the Vision 2030 logistics build-out. The regional desk covers the Gulf, the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and everything that flows between them. Mode desks track air cargo, sea freight and road & rail, and a global wire keeps an eye on the rates, carriers and supply-chain moves that reach every desk in the region.

Corrections & story tips

Spotted an error, or reporting we should be tracking? Write to the newsdesk at info@riyadhcargo.com.

The Markets Desk — method

The strip at the top of the front page carries four numbers: Brent, WTI, Jet A-1 and the air cargo rate. They come from three different kinds of source and they are not equally live. Here is exactly what each one is, so you can decide how much weight to put on it.

Crude — Brent and WTI

Front-month futures quotes, refreshed roughly every twenty minutes. Beneath each crude figure we also print the most recent official spot assessment from the U.S. Energy Information Administration — series RBRTE (Europe Brent Spot FOB) and RWTC (Cushing WTI Spot FOB) — with the date it was assessed.

Those EIA prints are not live, and they are not meant to be. They publish on the Weekly Petroleum Status Report cycle, so the newest one is typically three to eight days old. A spot assessment and a futures quote are different instruments measuring different things, and we show both rather than quietly passing one off as the other.

Jet A-1 — indicative, and here is why

There is no free, live, machine-readable Jet A-1 assessment anywhere in the world. The physical jet benchmarks are assessed by S&P Global Platts and by Argus; they are licensed commercial products; and the weekly global figure IATA publishes is Platts data republished under licence. We do not hold that licence, and we will not scrape it.

So we model it, the way a fuel desk does. The EIA publishes a daily spot price for kerosene-type jet fuel on the U.S. Gulf Coast — series EER_EPJK_PF4_RGC_DPG, quoted in dollars per US gallon. From the most recent date on which the EIA prints both jet and Brent, we take the difference:

The crack spread — the refining margin between crude and jet — is the slow half of the price; crude is the fast half. Bolting a live crude quote onto the latest known crack gives a jet number that tracks the market through the day while staying anchored to a real, published assessment. The card shows the crack, the date it was struck, and the underlying EIA print, so you can see precisely how much of the figure is observed and how much is inferred.

The limitation is the one you would expect. If the crack moves, the model is stale until the EIA prints again. In a quiet market that is a matter of cents. 2026 has not been a quiet market — distillate cracks have run far above their historical norm — which is precisely why the crack is displayed rather than buried. We also carry the front-month ULSD / heating oil contract beside it, because that is the instrument jet fuel is actually hedged against, and it is a live quote rather than a model.

Air cargo — dollars per kilo

The same problem, one step further. Every credible air freight rate index — TAC Index, the Freightos Air Index, Xeneta, WorldACD — is a licensed commercial product. None of them publishes a free machine-readable feed, and we are not going to paper over that by inventing a number.

What we do instead is what a newsroom does: we quote the published figure and link the story it came from. The rate on the strip is the most recent per-kilo price reported on the wire we already monitor — typically WorldACD’s weekly market data, carried by the air cargo trade press — with the publisher and the date attached and the headline one click away. It is a citation, not a data feed, and it is labelled as one. A figure older than a few weeks is dropped rather than shown stale.

Sources, licensing and corrections

EIA data is a work of the U.S. Government: public domain, citation requested, and cited here. Futures quotes are delivered under the terms of the vendor supplying them. Air cargo rates remain the property of the organisations that assess them and appear here only as short, attributed, linked citations in the course of reporting. Platts and Argus assessments are not reproduced on this site in any form.

The whole strip is also published as JSON at /markets.json, with the provenance notes attached to every field. If you think a number on it is wrong, tell us: info@riyadhcargo.com. We would rather be corrected than confident.