UMAX Shipping Inc.
Keith Shavers, LCB
Licensed customs broker, compliance and operations | NVOCC, freight forwarding, drayage and a customs arm in build | City of Industry, California | Monday 17 August, 10:00 PDT, booked by reply
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UMAX Shipping Inc. is a US ocean and air freight business in City of Industry, California, incorporated in March 2016. They run as an NVOCC and freight forwarder, they are the exclusive Americas partner for MaxWide Logistics, and they own two named subsidiaries: MAXKlear for customs clearance and regulatory compliance, and MAXDray for drayage and domestic moves. Their own site claims 14 branches and 10 core carriers. Keith puts their volume at thousands of containers a month, and their public import record backs that up with 71,810 bills of lading on file since June 2024 and 4,613 in the last thirty days alone.
The reply that started this came from Shunan Liu, the President, who asked for a profile of Ripple. The person who then took over the thread, set the agenda and booked the call is Keith Shavers, who signs LCB, meaning he holds an individual customs broker licence from CBP. He is the trade compliance function here, and the email subject line he replied under names three entities: Rippleshift, UMAX Shipping and MAXKlear, Inc. That is the tell. He is not treating this as a vendor enquiry for the forwarding business, he is scoping it for the brokerage they are standing up.
The honest one-sentence picture: UMAX is a high-volume NVOCC that does not yet file its own customs entries, is building a licensed brokerage arm around a broker who is already in the seat, and has told Ripple in writing that once that licence lands they will want a closer look, while also asking two questions on this call that have nothing to do with HTS classification.
The Conversation So Far
Every message, in order
- 5 August, 16:01 UTC. Cold email from Adrian to Shunan Liu, noting UMAX files HTS classifications across a range of codes, leading with the first pass in minutes at 99.8 percent accuracy, and the Pentagon Freight Services proof of three weeks down to fifteen minutes.
- 5 August, 17:39 UTC. Shunan Liu replied in one line: "Thanks for reaching out. Can you please provide a profile of Ripple?" He copied Keith on that reply, which is how Keith entered the thread.
- 5 August, 17:47 UTC. Adrian sent the website and his LinkedIn, framed it as a 1,000 line invoice coming back in about 15 minutes, and offered to run a couple of their own entries live.
- 6 and 11 August. Two follow-ups. No reply to either.
- 13 August, 01:05 UTC. Keith replied at length under a new subject naming MAXKlear, Inc., asked for Friday 8/14, and set out three separate things he wants covered. This is the message that matters and it is broken down in the next section.
- 13 August, 17:20 UTC. Adrian offered Monday instead and sent the invite.
- 13 August, 17:23 UTC. Keith confirmed: "Monday 8/17 @ 10am works for me."
Two people are in this thread. Shunan Liu is the President and made the first reply. Keith is the operator who took it over, set the agenda and booked the time. Expect Keith on the call and treat Shunan as the person Keith reports the outcome to.
The Three Questions He Asked
Read this before anything else on the page
Keith wrote out his own agenda in the 13 August email. He is not coming to hear an HTS pitch, he is coming with a list. One of the three items is the classifier. The other two are not. Walking in without a decided answer to all three is the single biggest risk on this call.
- His words: "right now, all of our entries are through 3rd party brokers. We are not yet permitted/licensed to act as a Customs broker. Once we are, however, we would obviously want to take a closer look at your services."
- "Most of our customer entries are 1-3 lines."
- "Most of the shipments handled by our forwarder/nvocc are handled by our customer's own nominated brokers."
- What he actually asked for: "we want to know what your platform looks like, its features, as well as your pricing structure."
- This is the classifier conversation, and he has already told you the timing is gated on a licence rather than on budget or belief.
- His words: "We are also a well-established freight forwarder/nvocc (thousands of containers/month), so we want to know what automation solutions can be provided to us as a forwarder/nvocc as well. Your website mentioned end to end automation. We are curious to know what that looks like."
- He has read the Ripple site and is quoting the end to end automation claim back.
- This lands on the RFQ response, document scanning and data entry agents rather than the classifier.
- This is the larger business today. The forwarding volume is real and running, the brokerage is not yet.
- His words: "we want to know what milestone/tracking/tracing tools you have (if any). We have a need to know the status of our shipments (customs clearance, arrival, departure, etc) for our multitude of shipments, the vast majority of which are ocean shipments."
- He is specific about the plumbing: "the ocean carriers provide electronic feeds, Customs provides AMS feed. We are interested in a platform that can economically tie all those feeds/milestones together and provide real-time visibility to ourselves, and possibly even our customers, through a portal, whether it be yours or ours."
- He said "if any", so he is genuinely asking rather than assuming.
- This is the one to decide on in advance. A straight answer about what Ripple does and does not do here will earn more trust than a stretch, and he has given permission with those two words.
Company Profile Intel
Keith Shavers
- Signs as: Keith Shavers, LCB. LCB is an individual Licensed Customs Broker credential issued by CBP, earned by exam. It is the credential a company needs a holder of before it can qualify for a corporate broker permit.
- Title: his LinkedIn headline reads compliance, CHB and operations manager. No title is published on the UMAX site. Worth confirming on the call.
- Based: Los Angeles area. Direct line 323-356-4383, same Castleton Street address as head office.
- Behaviour in the thread: detailed, structured, numbered his asks, volunteered the awkward facts unprompted. He is straight with you, so be straight back.
- Authority read: he took the thread off the President, set the agenda and booked the time himself. He is at minimum the person who decides what gets recommended.
UMAX Shipping Inc.
- Legal entity: UMAX Shipping Inc., California entity 3888163, incorporated 21 March 2016
- HQ: 17870 Castleton Street, Suite 210, City of Industry, CA 91748
- Network: 14 branches and 10 core carriers on their own site
- Subsidiaries: MAXKlear for customs clearance and regulatory compliance, MAXDray for drayage and domestic logistics across the Americas
- Partner: exclusive Americas partner of MaxWide Logistics
- Headcount: one third-party source puts it at 50 to 100. Their LinkedIn band could not be read at build time. Do not quote a number, ask instead.
Key intel
- UMAX does not file its own customs entries today. Keith stated it plainly in writing, unprompted, before any call.
- MAXKlear, Inc. is already named as a customs clearance and regulatory compliance provider on their own website, and Keith put it in the email subject line. The brokerage is being built, not merely considered.
- Keith holds the individual licence. The company permit is what is missing, not the person.
- Their public import record shows 71,810 bills of lading between June 2024 and August 2026, with 4,613 in the last thirty days and 15,162 in the last ninety.
- Top US destinations are Los Angeles, Long Beach and Newark. Top origins are Qingdao, Pusan, Ningbo, Shanghai, Yantian and Vung Tau, so China is dominant with Korea and Vietnam alongside it.
- Goods on their record include electric fuel pump assemblies, LED lights, glyphosate 62 percent IPA salt, PVC fencing and bottle unscramblers. That is a wide, mixed commodity book, not a single-chapter trade.
- Their email footer carries a standing fraud warning about invoice and bank detail spoofing. They have been targeted before, which is worth knowing before any payment or contract discussion.
Business Model
What they sell
- Ocean freight: NVOCC services, the core of the business, and the vast majority of their volume by Keith's own account
- Air freight: time-sensitive lanes
- SOC business: shipper-owned container services with DDU and DDP door to door options
- Customs brokerage: sold through MAXKlear, delivered today through third-party brokers
- Domestic brokerage and warehousing: through MAXDray, drayage across the Americas
How they make money
- Freight margin on ocean and air moves is the engine. Volume is the lever, not price.
- DDU and DDP door to door means they take responsibility for the whole chain, including clearance, and buy the clearance in
- Drayage and warehousing add margin on the back end of the same container
- Customs is currently a cost they pay out, not a line they invoice. That is the gap MAXKlear exists to close.
- Nothing is priced publicly. Every service page ends at a contact form.
The structural point worth holding onto
UMAX already touches the shipment end to end and already sells DDU and DDP, which means they already promise clearance as part of the deal. They just do not perform it. Every entry on a shipment they control is revenue leaving the building to a third-party broker, and on the shipments where the customer nominates their own broker, UMAX loses both the fee and the visibility. Standing up MAXKlear is how that money and that control come back in house. The classifier is not a cost saving for them, it is the thing that makes a brand new brokerage viable without first hiring a classification desk.
The Numbers
Read this first
There is no public revenue figure for UMAX and none should be estimated. Forwarder revenue includes pass-through freight and duty, so it would say little even if it existed. The shipment figures below come from public bill of lading data and count records where UMAX appears on the manifest. They are a fair measure of how much freight moves through the business. They are not a measure of customs entries, because UMAX does not file those.
Verified from primary sources
- 71,810 bills of lading on file, 25 June 2024 to 14 August 2026
- 4,613 records in the last 30 days, 15,162 in the last 90
- Top US ports: Los Angeles 22,781, Long Beach 14,696, Newark 8,059
- Top origins: Qingdao 13,465, Pusan 11,336, Ningbo 8,890, Shanghai 8,472, Yantian 8,250, Vung Tau 4,882
- California entity 3888163, incorporated 21 March 2016
- 14 branches, 10 core carriers, from their own site
Estimated or stated, handle with care
- Thousands of containers per month. Keith's own words, so it can be quoted back to him.
- Headcount 50 to 100 from one third-party aggregator only. Not confirmed against LinkedIn. Ask, do not assert.
- Annual volume figure of 90,000 appears on their own site with no unit stated. Unusable as a number until he explains it.
- Revenue: not estimable. Do not anchor one.
- Entry count: unknown and unknowable publicly, because the entries are filed under other brokers' codes.
The signal that matters
Two numbers sit next to each other and they tell the whole story. 4,613 bills of lading in thirty days, and zero customs entries filed in house. Every one of those shipments needs classifying and clearing, and right now every one of those fees goes to somebody else. Keith's line about entries being one to three lines is easy to hear as "our classification work is trivial", but at this shipment count it is the opposite. High count and low complexity is the exact shape where a human per-entry cost is hardest to justify and a machine first pass is worth the most.
Pain Signals & Gaps
- Keith wrote: "We are not yet permitted/licensed to act as a Customs broker. Once we are, however, we would obviously want to take a closer look at your services."
- MAXKlear, Inc. is already described on their own website as a full-service provider of customs clearance and regulatory compliance, and Keith named it in the email subject line.
- A corporate customs broker permit requires a licensed individual to qualify it. Keith holds that licence, so the hard part is done.
- This is a build in progress with a date on it, not a maybe. The only unknown is how far along the permit is.
- An AI HTS classifier here would let a brand new brokerage take entry volume from day one without first hiring a classification desk, which is normally the thing that makes standing up a brokerage slow and expensive.
- All entries go to third-party brokers today, on Keith's own account.
- Most shipments handled by the forwarding and NVOCC side go through the customer's own nominated broker, so UMAX loses the fee and the visibility on the same shipment.
- They sell DDU and DDP door to door, which means they are already promising clearance and buying it in at someone else's margin.
- 71,810 bills of lading since June 2024 sets the scale of what is passing through untouched.
- An AI HTS classifier here would turn customs from a cost UMAX pays out into a line they invoice, on freight they already control, without needing the headcount that normally comes with it.
- Keith: "Most of our customer entries are 1-3 lines."
- At 4,613 bills of lading in a month, a small per-entry human cost multiplies into a large number very quickly.
- Their commodity book is wide rather than deep: electric fuel pump assemblies, LED lights, glyphosate, PVC fencing, bottle unscramblers. Chapters 38, 39, 84 and 85 are all live.
- Wide and shallow is harder to memorise than narrow and deep, so a human desk gets no compounding benefit from repetition across this mix.
- An AI HTS classifier here would price per entry at a level a one to three line entry can actually carry, which is the difference between MAXKlear being able to compete on those entries and not.
- Four of their top six origin ports are Chinese: Qingdao, Ningbo, Shanghai and Yantian, together well over 39,000 records.
- Pusan in Korea and Vung Tau in Vietnam sitting high in the same list suggests a China plus one shift is already underway across their customer base.
- Section 301 applies on China origin and Section 232 stacks wherever steel articles appear, so classification and origin errors are expensive on this mix.
- UMAX carries none of that duty liability today because the customer's broker files it. They do carry the relationship when it goes wrong.
- An AI HTS classifier here would give MAXKlear something to say to a customer about why the entry should move off their nominated broker, which is accuracy and evidence rather than price.
- He asked three things. Only the customs one maps to the HTS Classifier.
- The forwarding and NVOCC automation question maps to the RFQ response, document scanning and data entry agents, which are real Ripple products but outside the scope of this campaign.
- The milestone and visibility question, tying ocean carrier feeds and the CBP AMS feed into one real-time portal, is not one of the five agents at all.
- He quoted the end to end automation claim from the Ripple website back, so the expectation came from Ripple's own copy.
- Deciding before the call exactly what to say to questions two and three is what turns this into a second meeting. A clear "here is what we do, here is what we do not" on visibility will hold more credibility than a stretch.
- 14 branches, 10 core carriers, thousands of containers a month, two subsidiaries and an exclusive Americas partnership.
- No trade compliance, classification or customs team is published anywhere on the site or in any third-party source.
- Keith appears to be the compliance function, and he is also carrying operations by his own LinkedIn headline.
- Nobody else from UMAX has appeared in the thread except the President.
- An AI HTS classifier here would mean the first pass is machine made and Keith's licence is spent on review and sign-off, which is the only way one licensed broker supports entry volume at this shipment count.
Where the Classifier Adds Value
UMAX is not an importer trying to cut a cost. They are a forwarder building a brokerage. That changes the frame completely. The classifier is not a saving for them, it is the thing that makes the new business line work at a price the entries can carry. These are the places it moves the needle.
Day one capacity for MAXKlear
A new brokerage normally cannot take volume until it has hired classifiers, and it cannot afford classifiers until it has volume. With the machine making the first pass and Keith reviewing and signing, MAXKlear can open with capacity it has not paid for yet. That is the single strongest reason to be in this conversation now rather than after the permit lands.
Recapture the entry fee on freight they already move
Every entry currently filed by a third party sits on a shipment UMAX already controls. Bringing that work in house converts a cost line into an invoice line on the same container, with no new customer acquisition needed. The classifier is what makes the delivery cost low enough for that conversion to be worth doing on one to three line entries.
A reason for customers to move off their nominated broker
Most of their shipments clear through the customer's own broker. Winning those entries means giving the customer a reason beyond price. Same day classification with a documented rationale behind every code, on a China heavy book where 301 and 232 stack, is a reason that stands up. It is also something the incumbent broker almost certainly cannot match.
Reasonable care from the very first entry
A new brokerage has no track record and CBP's standard is reasonable care, judged on the record of how each code was reached. Starting with a classifier that outputs its reasoning means MAXKlear has a consistent, auditable trail from entry one, rather than building that discipline in later after something goes wrong.
The wider platform conversation he opened himself
He asked what end to end automation looks like for a forwarder and NVOCC, and what exists for milestone and visibility. That is him asking to be sold more, not less. Even where the answer is that a piece sits outside what is on the table today, mapping his three questions against what Ripple actually does is the most useful thing that can happen on this call, and it is what gets a second one booked.
Questions for the Call
Watch-Outs
Do not run this as a standard HTS pitch
The opening cold email said UMAX files HTS classifications across a range of codes. Keith has since corrected that in writing: they do not file entries at all. Repeating the original framing on the call will read as not having listened to the one long email he took the trouble to write. Acknowledge what he said early, then build from where they actually are, which is a forwarder standing up a brokerage. That is a better story anyway.
Do not hear "1 to 3 lines" as small
It is the natural reading and it is the wrong one. One to three lines across thousands of entries is a high count, low value per unit workload, which is precisely where human classification costs the most relative to what it is worth and where a machine first pass earns the most. If he uses that line to lower expectations, the honest reply is that it makes the case stronger, not weaker, and the maths is easy to show him live.
Three numbers not to say out loud
- Headcount. One aggregator says 50 to 100 and it could not be confirmed against LinkedIn. Naming a wrong number costs credibility for nothing. Ask him.
- Revenue. No estimate exists anywhere and forwarder revenue is mostly pass-through freight, so any figure used would be invented.
- Their entry volume. It is not public and cannot be, because the entries are filed under other brokers' codes. Their bill of lading count is a freight measure, not an entry measure. Use it as evidence of scale, never as an entry number.
Two people, two different jobs
Shunan Liu is the President and made the first reply asking for a profile of Ripple. Keith took the thread over and booked the call. Keith is the operator and the licence holder, but a decision of any size will go back through Shunan. Ending the call with something Keith can forward internally, ideally a short written summary of what was covered against his three questions, is worth more here than a proposal.