WELCOME to Beef Central’s Top 25 Livestock Transporters feature, profiling one of the most important and often overlooked links in the complex Australian meat and livestock supply chain.

Presented over the next three weeks as this feature unfolds will be the most comprehensive summary ever prepared on the nation’s livestock transport industry, and its largest players.

We first undertook a Top 25 stock transporters report back in 2013, providing a 12-year contrast to compare progress and change against today’s stock transport industry (click here to view the 2013 Top 25 table).

In many ways, livestock transporters represent the lifeblood of the Australian meat and livestock supply chain, providing the vital linkage between breeding paddock, backgrounding property, saleyard, feedlot and meat processing plant or live export port.

The Top 25 feature includes:

• A detailed table (click here to view, or access via Beef Central’s home-page navigation bar, or Top 25 icon appearing at top right of home page), listing the largest transporters by one-time uplift capacity; prime mover numbers and trailer numbers. This list will grow as the feature unfolds.
• Profiles on each of the Top 25 entrants will appear in reverse order as the countdown takes place (click here to access), focussing on how each business started, what ‘makes them tick’ today, the markets they service, a summary of their equipment and their contact details; and
• A series of articles on the big issues facing the Australian livestock transport industry.

Research for this report has been exhaustive, engaging directly with more than 60 candidate businesses across every state and territory over the past two months, in an attempt to make the list as comprehensive, consistent and reliable as possible. The report’s output is a lot more than a simple desktop study or Google search, but is based on first-hand statistical collection directly from industry stakeholders. Readers will note the list is ranked, using a formula described below, and not simply offered as a loose collection of ’25 of the largest.’

As a handy future reference and contacts resource, the Top 25 articles and the table of entries remain permanently accessible on the Beef and Sheep Central websites.

How the list was compiled:

The ranking protocol we’ve chosen for the top 25 is designed to account for different parts of Australia, where different trailer configurations are allowed. Business in the Northern Territory is almost all roadtrains (six standard 40-foot cattle decks), while in Victoria, the same vehicle is likely to haul B-double trailers (three decks). This makes the ‘prime mover’ count somewhat misleading.

Our solution is to use a metric of ‘one-time capacity uplift’ given the available prime mover and trailer combinations in use in each state. Thus a business with a dozen prime movers, all run as roadtrains, would out-rank a business with 15 prime movers, all set up for B-double work.

While the table accompanying this report will list each company’s prime mover and trailer numbers, it will be one-time uplift capacity that will be used to rank entries.

Anecdotally, there has been growth in the owner-operator transport segment in recent years, with a lot more beef grazing enterprises now owning a truck/trailer combination or two that are sometimes sub-contracted out to others. That happens more when transport demand is high. But for the purposes of this report, we have restricted statistics to company-owned trucks and trailers only, not sub-contractors.

In cases where operators transport both cattle and sheep, we have used cattle equivalents – ie a three-deck sheep trailer becomes a two-deck cattle trailer, for the purposes of the summary.

$1.1 billion total fleet value

In combination our 2025 Top 25 livestock Transporters operate a total of 736 prime movers and more than 1800 trailers, used in road-train, B-double, B-triple and other configurations. That figure is up from 614 prime movers in our original 2013 report.

At a conservative average replacement cost per prime mover of $650,000 (only $375,000 back in 2013), that values the trucks alone at $480 million. With three double deck trailers and two dolleys currently priced at around $950,000, it values a fully-set-up six-deck road train today at about $1.6 million before registration.

On that basis, the total value of the Top 25 fleet is more than $1.1 billion.

Key findings

Our latest Top 25 transporters feature will contain a number of big surprises as it unfolds in coming days. Here are some of our key observations about the entries and industry trends, which will be explored in greater detail:

Operators getting bigger: It’s taken 51 decks (40 foot cattle deck equivalents) in terms of one-time uplift capacity to make this year’s Top 25 list. Twelve years ago in our previous report, it took as few as eight prime movers and 37 decks of haulage capacity to make the 2013 list.

Quite a number of businesses on the latest list have additional trucks on order, or currently being fitted-out. There will be at least one large transport business acquisition announced while this feature is in progress, making one of the Top 25 even larger by the time that entry appears. Stand by for details in coming days.

Eleven entries that appeared on our original 2013 Top 25 list are not included this year. That’s happened for a variety of reasons, including mergers and acquisitions among existing trucking businesses; business acquisitions by new players; business closures due to retirement or bankruptcy; organic growth among smaller trucking operators who have now ‘leap-frogged’ some of the earlier entries; and expansion into livestock operations among already-large general freight carriers.

All bar two of our Top 25 are what we could describe as ‘family-owned’ businesses. Of those, many are second and third generation family businesses, started by the present owners’ fathers, grandfathers or uncles. Many of the company CEOs we spoke to still regularly spend some time behind the wheel.

The nature and client-base of operations on the list vary enormously. Several service just one customer, such as a large processor. Others have few, if any close alignments with large customers, servicing hundreds, if not thousands of different customers over a 12-month cycle.

Entries in our Top 25 come from every mainland Australian state plus Tasmania and the Northern Territory.

Average haulage distance for each load also varies enormously. One entry based in Alice Springs has average haul distances of 1600km. Another Victorian operator spoken to during research had average haulage distances of 200km or less. When Beef Central’s research team spoke to him, he had one rig that had three local jobs scheduled for the same day.

While most of the Top 25 are clearly seen is being based in one region of Australia, in reality many are doing business across an incredibly wide footprint of the continent. A fleet truck based out of Alice Springs could easily be delivering cattle to Broome, or Naracoorte. Another based out of Wagga could easily drop a load off at an abattoir or feedlot in southeast Queensland, before picking up another load at Roma for a run back to the Riverina.

Sweet-spot in size

There appears to be a ‘sweet spot’ in terms of enterprise scale which provides business advantages for larger operators. Somewhere around eight to ten trucks provides opportunity to spread fixed costs further, establish better-equipped maintenance facilities, employing mechanics, admin staff or scheduling managers, while also allowing the business to compete for pastoral company-scale work, where larger uplifts are required.

That partly explains why there is a log-jam of operators either just inside or just outside our Top 25 list, who operate 8-10 trucks and 25-40 trailers. In a separate article to come, we will list a bunch of other transport operators who fell just outside our ranking formula to make the list, but are still substantial businesses, nonetheless.

This year’s report shows almost complete dominance of Kenworth Prime movers among the entrants. In our previous 2013 report, Kenworths were still the most popular choice, but there were more Macks and Freightliners in some fleets.

Key drivers

A series of industry structural changes appear to have have provided catalysts for either establishment of new trucking businesses, or a turning-point in shifting a smaller operation into something larger.

An obvious one is the major expansion that’s occurred in lotfeeding operations across Australia.

As of December, cattle numbers on feed in Australia reached a record 1.45 million head, with more than 3.1 million grainfed cattle turned off in 2024. Where once plenty of slaughter cattle (especially in Queensland) went from property of birth direct to the abattoir, today, there are more links in the transport chain, with relocations from breeding to backgrounding properties and/or feedlots, before finally heading to slaughter. That adds extra work and uplifts for transport operators.

Equally there is a lot more North/South cattle traffic occurring across the eastern and southern states. Southern processors are now routinely buying slaughter cattle out of Queensland, while Queensland feedlots buy large numbers of Angus and Wagyu feeder cattle out of Victoria or eastern parts of South Australia.

We at Beef and Sheep Central hope you enjoy this important industry feature as it unfolds over the next three weeks. We thank the industry stakeholders who have supported this feature with advertising, providing the foundation for us to do the necessary research and analysis.

For future reference purposes, the feature articles and the Top 25 table of entries will remain prominently displayed on the Beef Central and Sheep Central websites.

Editor’s note: Some companies use apostrophes in their company titles and logos, others don’t. For the purposes of this report, we’ve stuck with each company’s preferred option.

• To see today’s separate articles on Top 25 entries number 25 Strasburg Livestock Transport and number 24, Bonsey’s Transport, click these highlighted links.
• Stand by for a Weekly Grill podcast this Friday with Australian Livestock and Rural Transporters Association president, Gerard Johnston.
• Beef Central has compiled a series of Top 25 Industry reports – not just desktop studies or Google searches, but exhaustively researched – over the past 12 years. Click here to view our recent Top 25 Lotfeeders report.