The Port of Baltimore’s Terminal Corporation has been witness to a lot over its 132 years in business, and while a variety of disruptions have altered business conditions over the last decade, the company remains optimistic.
Few waterfront companies last a century and fewer still a century plus three more decades for good measure, but the Port of Baltimore’s Terminal Corporation in June [2025] will be entering its 132nd year in business.
Baltimore-based Terminal Corporation is a 3PL that specializes in warehousing and transportation, although those two business lines each encompass a variety of related services.
Pete Menzies, President and his brother Perry Menzies, CEO now run Terminal Corporation. And held a joint interview with the AJOT to explain the origins of the company, the services it provides and some of the challenges that the company and the industry itself faces.
As Perry Menzies told the AJOT, “The company came into our family’s control in the early 1960s. And for a while we were just a local manufacturing support warehouse until the container terminal, the Seagirt container terminal, was built in the late ‘80s. And then we really started getting into the handling of the imported containerized cargo. And that’s really what put us on our path to today.”
The Two Legs of the Business
In terms of the two-legs that represent Terminal Corporation’s business segments, Perry Menzies outlined, “On the trucking side, it’s that first mile, and that’s the container [drayage] portion, and then regional full truckload delivery services.” Menzies noted, “And then on the warehouse side, we operate close to 1.5 million square feet of warehouse space in Baltimore, Maryland and Jacksonville, Florida. And that’s a blend of public warehousing, contract warehousing, cross-docking, transloading, and then some various value-added services.”
Cross-docking and transloading have become important in US East Coast logistics, particularly when it is moving cargos between trucks and rail. And ideally the new cross-docking and transloading facilities are located near ports.
“There’s a huge need to move cargo inland. [This was] especially [true] during COVID. So… to keep your waterfront warehouses [empty], that’s going to be more expensive than your Midwest warehouses empty and turning the containers at the port and then shipping the cargo inland to more affordable storage or closer to where the final destination is [located],” Peter Menzies said of the transloading dynamic.
And from the warehousing perspective, inventory management is a key to balancing out some of the roller coaster ride inherent to the supply chain. As Perry Menzies remarked, “the majority of our customers are very large shippers or importers, and they basically set up stocking programs to hold inventory close to their customers so that when they make a sale, they pull it out of our warehouse.”
And Peter Menzies added that “there’s only so much bonded warehouse space to go around. There’s tons of [cargo] increase around bonded space, and I know that there’s not nearly enough bonded space in Baltimore to accommodate all of it.”
Business Conditions: Disruption to Disruption
Terminal Corporation experienced the highs and lows of business during the COVID pandemic period. As Perry Menzies, said of the period, “So, our services were in high demand during COVID. … that was 2021 and 2022. And 2023, we saw sort of an inventory correction after COVID. So, a lot of our customers were over inventoried, so they significantly reduced their import volumes so that they could work through their inventory. So, we saw a tremendous slowdown beginning of 2023 that pretty much lasted all through 2023. And then towards the tail end of 2023, and into 2024, we sort of saw volumes, or imports normalize…”
But for the Terminal Corp and the entire Baltimore community everything suddenly changed with the collapse of the Francis Scott Key bridge.
“And then of course the bridge collapsed in March of 2024, which really hurt us. It basically forced our customers, the importers, to divert their shipments to other ports of entry on the East Coast. And so, we mobilized our trucking assets to some of these other ports of entry, so we’re at least able to retrieve the cargo and bring it up to our service network in Baltimore. [As a result] we still had a steady stream of revenue, but a lot of the cargo that was diverted to these other ports stayed in those other ports. So, [for] 2024, we really kind of had to limp along and just get through the year and wait for the channel to open back up,” Perry Menzies said of the business climate in 2024.
Terminal Corp, saw a “rebound in volumes” in 2024 but as Perry Menzies says “we’re sort of on the fence wondering what the second half of the year [2025] is going to look like. Just thinking about how much of our customers are front-loading inventory in anticipation of potential tariff and longer-term tariff issues.”
Nonetheless, Perry Menzies says, “We’re cautiously optimistic …[on] how it’s going to pan out. Mainly for us, only because the majority of our customers are also the producers of the cargo and they’re not going to shut the mills down. It’s too expensive for them to do that. So, we see imports will probably continue at sort of a normal cadence…”
