Coyote to announce layoffs Friday, sources say

Coyote Logistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of UPS Inc. (NYSE: UPS), is expected to announce Friday that it will lay off approximately 200 people, according to people familiar with the matter.

It was not immediately clear where the layoffs will occur. At the end of January, rumors spread that layoffs would be concentrated on Coyote’s Large Enterprise operations teams, the staff who are dedicated to Coyote’s largest shipper accounts. Significantly lower truckload volumes at Coyote, which sources said dropped from over 8,000 non-UPS loads per day to approximately 6,100 non-UPS loads per day over the past year, meant that operations teams were underutilized.

But sources spoke to FreightWaves about a conflict between Coyote and UPS management regarding which employees would be terminated, delaying the layoff until Feb. 16. The first list that Coyote’s middle managers generated was adjusted and broadened to conform to UPS’ diversity, equity and inclusion mandate that underrepresented groups were not to be disproportionately impacted by the cuts. “Low performers” across all divisions, not limited to mostly Large Enterprise, will be affected by Friday’s cut, with an emphasis on non-revenue-generating cost centers like IT and operations.

In 2015, UPS acquired Coyote for $1.8 billion, about one times revenue that year. Since then, Coyote has doubled in size, with estimated 2022 revenue of $3.8 billion. Coyote’s revenue story hasn’t always been up and to the right, though: 2022 revenue was markedly lower than 2021’s $4.7 billion.