Radiant Logistics: cheap at the trough, now armed for the freight recovery

On September 14, Radiant Logistics (NYSE American: RLGT) reported fiscal fourth-quarter results that cleared the bar by a wide margin — diluted earnings of $0.15 a share on revenue of $261.4 million, against an analyst expectation of roughly $0.06 — and the market responded by driving the stock up about 10% in after-hours trading. For anyone who only saw the headline, that looks like an earnings story. But the quarter matters most because of something that happened a month earlier, on August 10: Radiant refinanced its $200 million credit facility, pushing the maturity to 2031, and expanded the accordion that lets it add further acquisition capacity.

Seen together, the two events describe a specific setup. Radiant is a freight forwarder and third-party logistics firm that just passed through a brutal multiyear downturn in shipping demand, kept its balance sheet nearly debt-free through it, and now has both a cheaper, longer-dated credit line and the first genuine evidence that the freight market is turning. The question worth asking is whether the market is correctly pricing the next operating phase — or whether the optimism rests on one strong quarter and a refinanced loan.

What Radiant actually is

Radiant is a non-asset-based logistics company: it owns trucks and planes only when a customer has a load that needs moving, and it routes most work through a network of company-owned and independently owned freight stations and agents. Its customers are mostly mid-market shippers. That model shapes how you should read its numbers.

Because Radiant bills freight costs straight through to customers, its total revenue of $934.4 million in fiscal 2026 overstates the economic size of the business. The gross profit it keeps — roughly $64.4 million in the fourth quarter alone — is the truer measure of what it earns, and management states its margins on that basis. In the fourth quarter, adjusted EBITDA of $10.4 million was up 31.6% from a year earlier, and the adjusted EBITDA margin expanded by 240 basis points to 15.5% of adjusted gross profit.

The turn, captured for only a month

Here is the important context: for all of fiscal 2026, adjusted EBITDA actually fell, to $36.7 million from $38.8 million the prior year. The year was still a down year; only the fourth quarter turned up. Management attributes the swing to the freight cycle inflecting — carrier attrition pulling capacity out of the North American truckload and intermodal markets, tighter driver availability, and higher spot rates and tender rejections through the spring into the June quarter.

Critically, management said the improvement only began in late May and early June, meaning roughly one month of the trend was captured in the fiscal year's results. The organic growth in the quarter was about 8%, led by U.S. forwarding and international airfreight. In other words, the recovery has evidence behind it, but it is very young — and much of it has yet to show up in reported numbers.

The financing that lets the turn matter

This is where the credit facility fits. The August refinancing extended the $200 million revolving line from a 2027 maturity to August 7, 2031; cut the funding cost, with borrowings now priced at SOFR plus 137.5 to 212.5 basis points depending on leverage; and raised the accordion that allows it to expand capacity from $75 million to $100 million — giving the company up to $300 million of total potential capacity (the $200 million base facility plus the $100 million accordion) for acquisitions. Separately, in November 2025 the board renewed a stock repurchase program authorizing the buyback of up to five million shares through the end of 2027, with the CEO saying at the time the share price did not adequately reflect long-term growth prospects.

That capacity is real but unproven. As of June 30, Radiant had $25.6 million in cash against $25.0 million drawn on the line, meaning no net debt. Management said it intends to supplement organic growth with "disciplined acquisitions" — agent-station conversions and tuck-ins — taking advantage of what it calls an active acquisition market after the freight recession.

Valuation is the bridge between cheap and broken

At the after-hours price near $9, with about 46.8 million shares outstanding, Radiant trades near a $420 million equity value. With net debt at zero, enterprise value is roughly the same figure. Against trailing adjusted EBITDA of $36.7 million, that is about 11.5 times — on a year that was still depressed by the downturn. On adjusted earnings per share of $0.52, the multiple is roughly 17 times.

The reason the stock can look cheap here is precisely that it is priced on trough earnings. That is the crux: the low multiple is not a sign of structural decline but of a cyclical trough, and the setup only becomes compelling if the recovery in rates and demand proves durable. If it does, earnings have room to normalize well above the trailing figure and the multiple compresses on its own. If the recovery stalls, the cheapness persists for a reason.

That is what separates a buy-the-dip opportunity from a falling knife. The stock had already absorbed the downturn — it traded around $8 before this quarter — and the valuation reset happened faster than the operating deterioration. What the market now seems to be pricing, with today's jump, is the turn itself.

What has to keep going

The strongest bear fact is symmetry: the same tightness that helps forwarders now — carrier attrition, higher rates — can reverse, and rates in freight have a habit of snapping back. Only about a month of the improving trend was inside the June quarter, and a single quarter does not establish a durable recovery. There is also execution risk in the plan to buy growth: bolt-on acquisitions in a recovering market can be overpriced, and financing capacity is not the same as disciplined deployment. Management has a history of restatements that should temper any assumption that the accounting is friction-free.

The honest read is that Radiant has reset its risk-reward in the right direction — cheaper, longer-dated capital sitting against a zero-debt balance sheet, a standing buyback, and the first real signs the cycle is turning — but the proof is incomplete. The next two to four quarters are the test: whether revenue and EBITDA growth actually continue into the September quarter and beyond, whether any acquisitions add value rather than just size, and whether management puts the buyback to work.

The credit facility, in other words, is not the story on its own. It is the ammunition for a story that has just started to write itself. For a holder, there is more reason to be patient than there has been in years. For a watcher deciding whether to chase the 10% jump, the answer is the same thing it always is in cyclical troughs: the multiple is only cheap while it stays early, and this is still early enough that it can be tested before the bets are fully priced.