Starting April 10! New regulations support truck drivers, will freight rates increase?

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On April 10, the “Internet Platform Price and Conduct Rules” (hereinafter referred to as the “Rules”) will officially take effect. As an important institutional framework in the platform economy sector, the Rules clearly draw a red line for price competition among online freight transportation platforms, and are expected to provide strong institutional support for the highway logistics industry, which has long been trapped in low-price competition.

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Trapped in the Quagmire of Low-Price Competition—Industry Ecosystem Urgently Needs Repair

Highway logistics accounts for more than 70% of the country’s total freight volume and serves as a crucial link connecting the production and consumption ends. However, against the backdrop of rapid penetration by digital technology and the platform economy, the industry has been stuck in a “volume increases but profits fall” dilemma for a long time, and price-cutting involution has become a heavy shackle on countless transportation practitioners.

In recent years, influenced by multiple factors such as structural overcapacity in transport resources and platform bidding mechanisms, highway logistics freight rates have fallen year after year. In 2024, the price for full-truck loads dropped 14.6% compared with the same period of the previous year. In some trunk-line routes, freight rates have even fallen below the cost line, resulting in extreme situations where it is “a loss for every trip.” Meanwhile, operating costs continue to rise, including fuel, road and bridge tolls, vehicle depreciation, and insurance. Even fuel alone accounts for more than 35% of total transportation costs, further squeezing the already thin profit margins.

More alarming is that some online freight transportation platforms, in order to capture market share, adopt low-price customer-acquisition strategies. They tacitly permit or even encourage shippers to post orders below cost, and also induce truck drivers to bid against each other and further slash prices through bidding mechanisms. In addition, issues such as data-driven “selling preferential treatment to some but not others” (killing customer trust through data), opaque pricing, and implicit take-rates occur repeatedly, severely underestimating the value of truck drivers’ labor. This vicious competition model not only prevents transportation practitioners from obtaining reasonable returns, but also gives rise to a “the bad drives out the good” effect, planting major hidden dangers for road traffic safety.

Prolonged low-price involution is undermining the foundation for healthy development of the highway logistics industry. Unstable transport capacity, declining service quality, and the continued loss of industry talent will ultimately affect the stability of the entire supply chain and the efficiency of real economic operations. Correcting industry development models is now an urgent necessity.

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Draw a Red Line for Price Competition—Precisely Addressing Persistent Industry Problems

The “Rules” that are about to take effect, although aimed at the entire platform economy sector, have core provisions that directly target the pain points of low-price involution in highway logistics. They provide a systematic solution for regulating the pricing behavior of online freight transportation platforms and safeguarding fair market competition.

The most core breakthrough of the Rules is the firm prevention of low-price dumping, and keeping the industry’s bottom line for survival. The new regulations clearly prohibit platform operators from selling goods or providing services at prices lower than operating costs for the purpose of squeezing out competitors. They also strictly forbid inducing or forcing business operators within the platform (truck drivers, logistics companies) to accept orders at low prices. This provision cuts off the vicious chain of loss-making order grabbing at the source, ensuring that freight rates can cover basic operating costs, providing institutional safeguards for freight rates to return to a reasonable range, and making “being paid fairly for one’s work” a norm in the industry.

In addition, to address chaos such as price discrimination via big data and algorithms, and covert price cutting, the new regulations also clearly prohibit such practices. They require that under the same transaction conditions, unified pricing must be implemented, and unfair differential pricing may not be carried out using technical means. At the same time, core mechanisms such as platform dynamic pricing and bidding ranking must be open and transparent, to eliminate algorithm “black box” operations and effectively protect truck drivers’ right to know and right to fair trading, so that price competition returns to a rational track.

With respect to price-conduct standards, the new regulations further refine requirements for clearly stated pricing. Platforms must fully and clearly disclose the components of freight rates, including items such as basic freight, fuel charges, tolls for roads and bridges, service fees, commissions, and more. They may not set “take-it-or-leave-it prices” or “vague prices.” Moreover, if platforms add or change fee items or fee standards, they must be disclosed in advance and solicit opinions for no less than 7 days. This, at the institutional level, prevents behaviors that harm practitioners’ interests, such as arbitrary charges, excessive take-rates, and hidden deductions, ensuring that every transaction is clear, public, and verifiable.

Industry insiders note that the core of the new rules can be summarized as “set rules for platforms, leave room for merchants, and back up practitioners.” It is intended to build a platform ecosystem with equal rights and responsibilities and orderly competition. Worth noting is that, compared with past warning talks and phased special rectification efforts, the new rules establish a normalized supervision mechanism and also provide clearly defined penalties. Both supervisory intensity and long-term effectiveness are significantly improved, offering solid legal safeguards for standardized development of the highway logistics industry.

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Reshape a New Industry Development Ecosystem

The implementation of the “Rules” is not only a regulatory constraint on platforms’ pricing behavior, but will also drive a systemic transformation in the highway logistics industry, guiding the industry’s ecosystem to shift from “competing on price” to “competing on value.”

Kong Zhen, associate professor at Beijing Institute of Information Technology, said that as low-price dumping is banned and freight rates return to a reasonable range, drivers’ income will be more closely matched with their labor input. The long-compressed profit space is expected to gradually be released. At the same time, price transparency, algorithm fairness, and standardized charging will effectively reduce hidden costs and infringements of rights and interests, giving transportation practitioners who are always on the road more dignity and protection.

For online freight transportation platforms, the new rules will become a catalyst to drive their transformation and quality improvement. Since low-price competition will be strictly limited, it will force platforms to abandon the “crude growth” approach and shift toward a high-quality development path that focuses on compliance-based operations and service value-added. In the future, the focal point of platform competition will shift from cutting freight rates and competing for order volume to improving vehicle–cargo matching efficiency, optimizing supply-chain services, and expanding value-added businesses such as finance and the after-market. This shift will not only help increase industry concentration, but will also gradually foster a healthier and more orderly market environment.

From the perspective of the entire highway logistics industry, once low-price involution is effectively curbed, market entities that operate in compliance will gain more room for development, which will drive overall transportation service quality to steadily improve. Stable and reasonable freight rates can both ensure the continued smooth flow of the logistics supply chain and avoid problems such as service shrinkage and delays in timeliness caused by excessive price cutting—helping optimize logistics costs across society on an ongoing basis.

In an interview, Kong Zhen further emphasized: “The implementation of the ‘Rules’ marks that the highway logistics industry will enter a new stage of standardized development. But good systems need strong execution to realize their value. Only by ensuring that the rules truly move from paper to practice can the highway logistics industry fully say goodbye to low-price involution and move onto the fast track of healthy development.”