Documents show strongest growth for FedEx

It may be fashionable these days for express companies to talk of logistics and supply chain management solutions, but for FedEx the boom area in the Middle East remains the traditional document traffic.
With rapid growth in service indus— tries in the region, FedEx has seen increases of up to 27 percent in its document traflic in the past year.
That compares with increases of around 20 percent in the inbound package market, and much more sluggish i-ales of growth in the outbound package business.
Driving document growth are initiatives such as the Dubai Internet City and Dubai Media City. The Internet City, inaugurated in November, is already home to the regional headquarters of companies such as Microsoft and Oracle.
‘These are Fortune 500 companies who know very well who FedEx is and
what we do, and that makes it easy for us to sell to them,” says I-Iamdi Osman, FedEx’s vice president Middle East, Indian Subcontinent and Sub-Saharan Af rica.
One of the beauties of the document business is that it is also much more bidirectional than the imbalanced package market too, he points out.
FedEx has been dramatically upgrading its longhaul lift into Dubai in recent years. Starting as just a stop on an eastbound MD-il flight in 1996, Dubai was upgraded to receive freighter flights in both directions in 1998, and in September 2000 to an A310 dedicated solely to linking it and lumhai in India with Asia and Europe. l)uhai gets about half of the A310’s capacity, while direct Asia to Europe traffic and vice versa now has its own non-stop MD-I 1.
Regional distribution is by Beechcraft 1900 aircraft operated by Falcon Avia
tion out of Dubai, where FedEx has its own sort facility on the north side of the airport
The Beechcrafts serve Kuwait, Barain and Saudi Arabia, but like DHL (see separate story), FedEx has also been building up its trucking network in the region in recent years. Trucks now serve as far north as Kuwait and as far east as Oman.