Freightos has widened its first-quarter loss after incurring a one-time cost of nearly $47m to become a listed company.

The container booking and payments platform, which merged with special purpose acquisition company Gesher I Acquisition Corp in late January to become listed on the Nasdaq stock market in New York, posted a $49.3m loss for the first three months of 2023. That is against a much smaller loss of $4.24m a year earlier.

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Freightos reported a $1.38 loss per share for the first quarter, up from a $0.86 loss per share a year ago.

Most of the loss was due to a $46.7m “share listing expense” absorbed during the first quarter that pushed operating expenses to $60.8m versus $6.89m in the same period last year.

As a result, Freightos recorded a $58m operating loss for the first quarter, up from $4.18m a year ago.

“Despite increased public company expenses in the second quarter relative to the first quarter, our cash burn is expected to stay roughly flat and we expect to see cash burn decline as revenues increase,” chief executive Zvi Schreiber said in a statement.

First-quarter revenue came in at $4.82m, up 9.9% from the same quarter in 2022.

Freightos, which also tracks air cargo, said it had a record 229,000 transactions for $169m in gross booking value during the quarter, double the number it had during last year’s first quarter.

“This represents the 13th consecutive quarter of record platform transactions,” the company said.

Looking ahead, Freightos expects to post its 14th transaction record by registering between 239,500 and 244,500 transactions in this year’s second quarter. It predicted from 1.02m to 1.12m transactions for all of 2023.

“Global freight’s digitalisation is continuing at the rapid pace we’ve been witnessing since 2019,” Schreiber said.

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