Radiant Logistics Just Had Its Best Quarter. The Multiple Has to Earn It.

When Radiant Logistics reported its fiscal fourth quarter this week, the top line looked like a breakout. Revenue climbed 18.5% to $261.4 million. The cash-earnings number investors watch, adjusted EBITDA, jumped 31.6% to $10.4 million, and its margin expanded by more than two percentage points year over year. Diluted profit of $0.15 a share came in roughly double what the Street had expected, and the shares popped in after-hours trading.

Pull back a step and the same report looks nothing like a breakout. Radiant's fiscal year ends in June, so the quarter that just closed on June 30 is its year-end finale, and the "full year" ran from July 2025 to June 2026. Across all four of those quarters, revenue grew a modest 3.5%, and — here is the line that matters — adjusted EBITDA actually shrank 5.4%, to $36.7 million. The company finished the year it just reported earning less in cash than the year before.

That contradiction is the whole story. The strongest quarter of the year landed in the final month of it, and the market had already been re-pricing the stock for the recovery before the print arrived. The question for anyone holding, or thinking about adding, Radiant (RLGT) is no longer "is the freight business turning?" It is "how much of that turn have you already paid for?"

A Breakout in One Quarter, a Shrinking Year in Three

Radiant is a third-party logistics company, which is a large freight broker in plain terms. It owns few of the trucks, ships, or planes itself; it matches shippers with carriers, manages the paperwork and routing, and layers on software. That structure makes it a leveraged play on the freight cycle. When trucking rates are fat, its margins expand; when the cycle turns, they thin. And the cycle turned, hard.

For most of fiscal 2026, North American trucking sat in a recession. Capacity was plentiful, rates were soft, and Radiant's early quarters carried the marks of that weakness. Then, late in the year, something shifted. Management attributed the fourth-quarter inflection to capacity finally leaving the market — drivers aging out and carriers exiting truckload and intermodal — which pushed spot rates and tender rejections up. Add a one-time lift from typhoon disaster-relief air freight, and a busy customs brokerage business propped up by a tangle of U.S. tariffs and escalating U.S.-Canada trade tensions, and you have a quarter where prices recovered on top of a recovering volume base.

But notice what the company's own chief financial officer said about how much of that 18.5% was organic: he put it at about 8%. The rest of the growth came from acquisitions and from higher freight rates — selling into a market where prices were finally climbing — not from moving meaningfully more freight. An "18.5% revenue jump" and an "8% organic jump" are two different stories, and the first one is the one that fits in a headline.

Who Paid for the Turn

This is where the stock and the business part ways. By mid-summer, the market had already re-rated Radiant into the recovery. Analysts had the company trading near 14.5 times their 2027 estimate of adjusted EBITDA — a level the company has historically spent most of its life well below. Its own long-run range is closer to 6 to 10 times. At today's roughly $380 million market cap, Radiant sits around 10 times its trailing adjusted EBITDA: at the very top of its historical band, and barely above where it has spent years.

That puts the stock in an awkward position. It is cheap next to the broader logistics sector, which trades around 17 times forward EBITDA. It is expensive next to itself. Which framing is right is the entire investment case, and it resolves to a single question: is this a cyclical freight broker that belongs at a single-digit multiple and simply had a great final quarter, or a technology-enabled platform that deserves a growth multiple and just proved it can grow?

The company wants you to hear the second. Its CEO describes its supply-chain visibility software, Navegate, not as a margin tool but as a growth engine — "extra basis points in growth rate," in his words, with one enterprise customer already managing more than 1,400 vendors on it. It wants you to hear "durable, longer-run recovery" when it talks about the freight market.

The Premium It Has to Earn

The catch is that the durable part is a promise, not a contract, and the market has already moved on it. Radiant had done its most important work by the end of the fiscal year: it finished with no net debt, extended its $200 million credit line to 2031, and expanded its acquisition capacity to $100 million. Management has said the unlevered balance sheet lets it "practically double" EBITDA through a basket of post-recession acquisitions. That is real optionality — and it is exactly the kind of setup that lets a stock run ahead of its earnings, because the optionality is priced before it is delivered.

So the invoice lands on the person who bought at the premium. If the driver shortage eases, capacity returns, the typhoon tailwind fades, or the tariffs get untangled, the "recovery" was a one-quarter blip, and the multiple has a place to fall: back toward the 6-to-10 times a freight broker has always earned. The fourth-quarter print is the first piece of evidence that the turn is real. It is not yet proof. What the next few quarters have to show is that the growth is volume, not just rates; that it survives without the one-time disaster-relief lift; and that it repeats. Until then, the breakout is a single quarter, the shrinking year is a fact, and the premium Radiant's stock now carries is something the company still has to pay back in earnings.