Every procurement team reaches the same fork before a renewal. Lock a rate for the year, or buy each load as it comes and take the market price.
The standard answer is that contracts are cheaper, because volume earns a discount. That is true often enough to be dangerous. In Thailand the honest answer depends on which market you are actually buying in, and most buyers have never been told there is more than one.
You are not choosing a price, you are choosing who carries the risk
Strip away the vocabulary and there are only a few ways to structure what you pay.
Fixed unit price. An agreed amount per trip, per kilometre or per drop. Easy to understand, easy to compare between carriers, and the usual arrangement for smaller volumes. The operator absorbs any cost movement during the term.
Hybrid unit price. The same, with a volume guarantee attached. The carrier is protected against being left with idle trucks when your season turns, and in exchange the unit price steps down as volume rises.
Cost-plus. You pay the operator's actual costs plus an agreed margin. Everything is visible, which makes internal budgeting straightforward. The weakness is real: nothing in it rewards the operator for becoming more efficient, and where the margin is a percentage of costs, cutting costs actively reduces their income.
Open book. You fund the whole operation and pay a management fee on top. This suits dedicated fleets. Its danger is that it can preserve whatever inefficiency existed on the first day, which is why cost-reduction incentives are normally written in alongside it.
Spot buying is not a separate category. It is a fixed unit price with a term of one journey.
Seen this way the question changes. You are deciding who carries the risk of costs moving, and how much visibility you are buying. Price is the output of that decision, not the decision itself.
Thailand is two markets wearing one name
The country has 6,218 registered road haulage businesses. Krungsri Research puts 547 of them, 8.8%, in the mid to large size band, and those 547 earned 71.8% of the industry's income in 2022.
The other 5,671 firms share what is left.
This is the fact that decides your answer, and it is why generic advice imported from other countries misleads here. There is a deep, crowded, competitive spot market at the small end, with 400 to 500 new operators entering every year between 2017 and 2022. There is also a much narrower field of operators with the balance sheet to hold a rate for twelve months and survive a bad quarter.
Buying spot from the crowded end and calling it "the market rate" tells you very little about what a contract from the other end should cost. They are not the same product.
Your segment decides more than your negotiating does
The concentration is not evenly spread, and this is where the decision is usually made for you.
| Segment | Operators | Share that are small or micro |
|---|---|---|
| General transport | 5,494 | 92% |
| Containerised haulage | 326 | 98% |
| Tanker services | 232 | 95% |
| Temperature controlled | 166 | 99% |
If you move general freight, you have thousands of possible suppliers and genuine spot leverage. If you move temperature-controlled goods, the entire national field is 166 operators, and the ones equipped for your specific product is a smaller number still.
Long-term agreements are already common in tankers and temperature-controlled work, and the table explains why. Where the field is that narrow, a contract is not a discount you negotiated. It is how you secure capacity at all.
The practical test: count how many operators could actually do your job to your standard. If the answer is more than about twenty, spot is a real option. If it is five, you are contracting whether you call it that or not.
The fuel question that makes Thai contracts different
A fixed price for twelve months assumes the carrier can forecast their costs for twelve months. Fuel is the largest single piece of what moves, so that assumption rests almost entirely on diesel.
Thailand does not leave diesel to drift with the world market. Under the Oil Fund Act, in force since September 2019, a levy is collected from refiners and importers by volume, and paid back out by volume, expressly to steady domestic prices against global swings. The rates are set under policy determined by the National Energy Policy Council.
The consequence for a rate card is easy to miss. The pump price here does not move as a smooth curve that an operator can hedge or average out. It moves in steps, when a committee decides it moves.
So a carrier offering a flat twelve-month rate is doing one of three things: building a buffer into the number to cover a step they cannot predict, planning to reopen the conversation when one arrives, or underpricing and hoping. The first costs you money on every load. The second means you do not have the certainty you thought you bought. The third is the one that ends with a carrier walking away mid-contract.
This is why a rate with a written fuel adjustment mechanism is often cheaper over a year than a flat one. Nobody is charging you a premium for carrying an unknown. The same logic sits underneath everything else in a freight rate.
What to settle before you sign anything
- How many operators can genuinely serve you. Do the count first. It sets your leverage before any conversation starts.
- What happens when diesel steps. Not whether there is a surcharge, but the trigger, the formula, and how often it can be applied. Silence here is not stability, it is an argument scheduled for later.
- Whether your volume is real. A hybrid rate with a guarantee you cannot meet is worse than a plain unit price. Commit to the volume you will actually ship in a bad month.
- What the contract covers when you need something unusual. Contract lanes and spot overflow are not in conflict. Most buyers end up running both, deliberately.
- How you exit. A twelve-month term with no notice provision is not a partnership, it is a trap for whichever side the market turns against.
The buyers who do worst are not the ones who chose wrongly between contract and spot. They are the ones who never worked out which market they were in, and negotiated hard for a discount on the wrong product.