Independent customs facility to open at New York JFK Airport

A new customs clearance facility is set to open in New York’s JFK International Airport in the next few weeks, offering an independent alternative for inbound air freight. California-based customs brokers Micom CHB, Inc., is currently putting the finishing touches to a facility that would initially process around 100,000 to 150,000 packages per month, but with the capacity to process many more.

Micom Vice President Dennis Nixt told Post&Parcel today that following a period of testing, he expected the facility to open by April.

With inbound shipments into JFK restricted to the big integrators like DHL and TNT, and the NYACC (New York Air Courier Clearance) cooperative, he said the new facility would open up a new alternative for shippers.

“We are going in as an independent just to get a little bit of competition in the market and try to improve the service levels,” he said.

Two clients are already in the frame to act as beta testers next month, and there is already good interest from other customers in making use of the facility.

Howard Cordover, international business services director at Caribbean Distribution, said he would be aiming to work with airlines in the Caribbean to take advantage of the new route into JFK.

“We will be using the facility at JFK. What this means is new revenue streams for the airlines,” he said, praising the Micom project for bringing competition to the market.

Facility

Micom has been in the customs brokerage business some 11 years, and for the past four years has operated its own customs clearance facility in Los Angeles.

The new JFK facility will dwarf the 30,000-per-month processing of Micom’s LA plant, taking advantage of New York’s much larger market for inbound air freight.

Working closely with US Customs, the development of the facility has required investment venturing into the millions of dollars ballpark, with a range of screening technologies deployed to meet Customs specifications – though details are confidential for security reasons.

Nixt said: “We are talking about having a customs officer on site – that way they can review the parcels and if they want to do an examination of a given piece, it would be our responsibility to extract it.”

Despite all the checks, he said it would be possible for most items to get through the facility in a matter of minutes. Once items are cleared, they can then be injected into the US Postal Service, FedEx or UPS network as required by customers.

E-commerce opportunities

Nixt said his company had started out handling mainly courier traffic, including film dailies for Hollywood movie-makers, but was now going after e-commerce volumes.

In particular, he said there would be a “real future” in the kind of online retailers like Amazon, which do not keep all their products stored in central warehouses.

The growing e-commerce market offered particularly good opportunities for a company like Micom since web retailers have to fiercely protect their reputations, he said.

“They’ve got an interest in getting their packages delivered to their customers on a timely basis,” he explained.

“If the customers don’t get their web shipment in five to 10 days they are going to cancel it, so web retailers tend to be accurate in their descriptions and evaluations, which is what customs are looking for.”