Technology secret to Nightline’s success

Nightline launched into the competitive domestic Irish parcels market last April, as a diversification from its traditional international freight and express operation.
Its growth strategy has been twofold. Firstly, it has sought to win the business of dissatisfied customers from rival operators through service delivery, while secondly it has approached companies with distribution that deliver in–house, and pitched them to a tailored out-sourced solution.
John Toughy, managing director of Nightline, says the technology his company has invested in the parcels business, separates him from competitors.
“We have spent around 5 million Euros on equipment for the operation. We offer near real time track and trace, when nobody else has really invested that much in technology for domestic parcels.”
Toughy says the market is well-covered by the four big players (Nightline, SDS, and the subsidiaries of La Poste and Deutsch post), but adds that quality of service has always been the route in for his company: “At the end of the day, I would say that the market is well-subscribed, if not over-subscribed, but it is not very well served. We thought there was still a lot of headroom on the quality side, for a best of class operation. The domestic maket had not seen an improvement in efficiency though technology in the last ten years.”
The domestic Irish parcels business currently moves between 100,000 and 130,000 parcels nightly. Based on these figures, toughy estimates his company has seized about 4.5 percent of the market since its launch in April last year. This is a 50% percent growth, from the 3 percent share he reported at the end of 2001. he confidently predicts another 50% growth for 2002.

market volume figure for domestic market