We are proud to report our solid success in 2007. Despite a slowing economy and challenging market conditions, our people again did a great job generating success and I would like to thank them for their tremendous efforts. We believe our results are evidence of the long–term view we take of our business and the rewards we believe come from placing service, relationships, and great people at the core of our company.
In light of the tougher transportation environment, many shareholders have asked how we were able to achieve such strong results. Our approach toward the market and growing our business was very consistent with previous years. Our ongoing commitment to providing excellent service to our customers and carriers, our diverse mix of modes and services, and our motivated employees supported by the right tools and technology all enabled us to meet our growth targets and capture more market share.
All of our modes and services contributed meaningfully to our strong performance. Our gross profits grew 14.9 percent in 2007 to $1.2 billion. While that was just shy of our long–term target of 15 percent annual growth, given the overall market conditions, in some ways our achievements this year are more impressive than the faster growth we had in recent years.
Our growth in 2007 was supported by the foundation that we laid in previous years, and we continue to invest in our business for the long term, building the platform for our future success. In 2007 we expanded our office network to a total of 218 offices in 21 countries. We added 564 people, bringing our total employee base to 7,332 globally. Our total customer relationships grew to 29,000 worldwide, and we now work with over 48,000 transportation providers around the world. Including 1.4 million shipments we handled in our transportation management service business, we managed over 6.5 million shipments in 2007.
Another key to our success, not only in 2007 but for the past several years, has been the diversification of our services. While ourprimary source of revenue continues to be North American truckload services, throughout our history, and especially in the last several decades, we have worked hard to find new ways to serve customers and suppliers. We continue to expand our capabilities within all our truckload offerings, such as growing our flatbed business, while also developing some specialized service offerings and other modes and services. Consistent with this strategy, in 2007 we acquired a domestic air freight company, giving us greater expertise to further grow the services we can provide to our customers. We think there are more ways that we can help our customers today than ever before, and it gives us a lot of opportunities to both grow existing relationships and develop new ones.
