Kuehne + Nagel boosts perishables presence with Oz acquisition
Logistics company Kuehne + Nagel is boosting its presence in the perishables market Down Under, with the acquisition of Australian freight forwarder Link Logistics International. It said today the acquired company was founded in 1998 as a privately-owned business with headquarters in Melbourne and facilities in Sydney and Tasmania. The firm employs 33 staff.
Link Logistics specialises in cold chain management, particularly in supplying services for the supply of perishable goods to the hospitality and consumer markets in Asia and the Middle East.
The company has onsite facilities for grading and sorting perishable goods including meat, fruit and vegetables, as well as cooling and labelling capabilities.
Tim Scharwith, executive vice president of Air Logistics at Kuehne + Nagel, said the acquisition was continuing his company’s strategic global expansion in the perishables logistics field.
“It will help accelerate our growth in this business segment and besides Europe we can also even better serve our customers in the Asian and Middle East perishable segments,” he said, adding: “In addition, jointly we can strengthen our position in the Australian freight market.”
Environmental
Separately, Kuehne + Nagel revealed this week that it has developed a new “environmentally-friendly” transport system for pharmaceuticals, which it claims can “substantially” reduce carbon emissions associated with shipment.
The company has taken to using state-of-the-art refrigerated trailers for transporting temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical products as part of a contract in Greece with pharmaceutical group Roche.
Based on its Europe-wide KN PharmaChain service, the new system uses Euro-5 compliant road transport, rather than air transport, while the refrigerated trailers mean that shipments no longer require passive temperature-control packaging – which saves on packing material and shipment volume.
Kuehne + Nagel said the service could reduce carbon emissions for the contract by around 85% compared to conventional pharmaceutical logistics.
Dirk Reich, the executive vice president at Kuehne + Nagel International, said the new system had been developed in close partnership with Roche.
“This clearly shows that Roche and Kuenhe and Nagel do more than pay lip service to the protection of the environment,” he said.
