Analysis of India Transport and Logistics Market May07
Analysis of India Transport and Logistics Market May07
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Pall-Ex is named as Business of the Year
Pall-Ex is delighted to announce winning the much coveted Business of the Year Award, at a ceremony for the Leicestershire Business Awards.The evening’s events were attended by representatives from 18 finalist companies from across the region.
The finalists for the award included Pall-Ex, Rushcliffe, and Geosynthetics. There were four rounds of judging before the winners were announced. Competition at this stage was tough. With 20,000 sq ft of storage Geosynthetics, part of the Hansam Group, is regarded as the largest distributor of geosynthetic material in the UK. Essentially they distribute fabrics which are used for soil stabilisation. Rushcliffe Care specialise in care for the elderly, and were finalists for the Success Through People award.
To win Business of the Year, Pall-Ex needed to demonstrate stability and strong reputation within the Leicestershire economy. The company easily exceeded these criteria by recently celebrating a landmark 10 years in business, and by currently assessing opportunities to expand the operation by building another hub in the style of the existing GBP 12 million investment situated in Ellistown, Leicestershire, close to the A50 and M1.. Essentially, Pall-Ex unites 100 member depots from across the UK. These regionally based haulage companies collect freight from their designated postcode areas, destined for other parts of the country or Europe. The freight is then transported to the central Pall-Ex transhipment hub.
At the hub, the freight is sorted by delivery area and assigned to the haulier serving that location for delivery. Next day and economy services are available. Pall-Ex has access to over 7,500 vehicles and more than five million square feet of warehousing in the UK and Europe. The co-ordination of freight collections and deliveries, minimizes mileage and maximises the usage of vehicle capacity. Essentially the Pall-Ex service concept is simple. They provide an organizational solution for cost effective distribution of palletised freight. The scale of the operation however, is breathtaking. Serving every UK postcode, from a 23 acre hub, Pall-Ex has a typical throughput of around 9000 pallets per night.
Read MoreDHL awarded at 2007 Asian Freight & Supply Chain Awards
DHL announced that it has won six top awards – Best Express Operator, Best Lead Logistics Provider, Best 3PL, Best Air Freight Forwarder, Best Project Cargo Forwarder and Best Sea Freight Forwarder – at the prestigious 2007 Asian Freight & Supply Chain Awards (AFSCAs). Receiving a total of six awards at the ceremony in Macau on 25 April reflects the company’s dominance as the only logistics provider that is able to offer integrated supply chain solutions across the entire express and logistics industry range from a single contact point.
The win in the highly coveted Best Express Operator Award category, for a record 21st consecutive year, is highly significant as DHL is the only company to have won this award since its introduction in 1987 at the Asian Freight Industry Awards – the predecessor of the AFSCAs. Receiving these six awards is a further affirmation of DHL’s market leadership and service excellence in air express and logistics offerings in Asia Pacific. The awards acknowledge DHL for its best-in-class expertise in each of its integrated service areas, covering express, air and ocean freight forwarding, as well as contract logistics.
The awards follow a series of recent DHL initiatives to strengthen and enhance service offerings in Asia Pacific to tap growth opportunities in the region. These include a USD35 million investment in Hong Kong for the opening of a new facility in South Kowloon; USD14 million in Vietnam for network and infrastructure upgrades and USD22 million for a new DHL Express Bangkok Hub. DHL’s investments in Asia Pacific sum up to an impressive over USD1.7 billion.
Read MoreChina Postal Group plans to set up insurance company
China Postal Group (CPG) plans to set up an insurance company which will be the country’s first insurer with sole investment from the postal sector, Wu Dingfu, chairman of China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC), said Tuesday.
Wu said the commission is currently dealing with the application submitted by the CPG for establishing an insurance company.
The company would be set up by the CPG and its plentiful subsidiaries across the country, and would provide insurance services involving relatively small amount of money as some Japanese insurers do, according to Wu.
About 20,000 insurance companies operating in Japan are mainly engaged in one-year life and medicare insurance and two-year property insurance, which usually set an upper limit to the compensation amount.
China’s postal sector, boasting 36,000 outlets nationwide, simply serves as the sales agent of insurance products for the moment, but was urged to explore further cooperation with the insurance sector.
Statistics show that nearly 14 percent of the country’s insurance agents come from the postal sector by the end of March.
The CPG has earlier made a step toward the financial reform in establishing the China Postal Savings Bank with total registered capital of 20 billion yuan (2.6 billion U.S. dollars), which becomes the country’s fifth largest bank.
Read MorePost de-regulation offers reseller opportunities
Deregulation of the postal market will see new and traditional players alike scrabbling to implement mobile devices to survive, according to market watchers at Zebra Technologies.
The loss of the Royal Mail‚s monopoly has resulted in a plethora of delivery companies and courier services entering the industry, fighting to stay ahead of the game in a newly-competitive environment. Zebra is predicting that new entrants to the industry will fail in this market within twelve months if they are not properly equipped, due to the new levels of competition.
In the ‘War of the postie’ it is technology that will help new market players to stay competitive – mobile devices will make or break processes including delivery of registered mail, and collecting returned goods,” said Clive Fearn, vertical marketing manager at Zebra. “It represents a big opportunity for businesses to provide tailored systems to all the big players in Europe. There‚s so much pressure to stay ahead of competitors, it is essential companies are properly equipped to work efficiently, and offer as many services as possible.”
In the last twelve months, Zebra has supplied printers to leading postal operators such as Polish, Portuguese and Hellenic post. The company also works with businesses such as TNT and DHL, and with major postal and private operators across EMEA on projects including the mobile post and electronic stamps.
Read MorePost Office hit list claim
The Welsh Liberal Democrats in Aberavon are calling for the government to publish its post office “hit list”.They claim the list shows post offices threatened with closure following a consultation on their future.
The Liberal Democrats have been campaigning to keep local post offices open.
Their five-point plan would see:
GBP 2 billion invested in post offices.
New branches opening where needed.
Government services continuing to be available at the Post Office.
The Post Office freed from Royal Mail restrictions which will allow it to develop new business.
A new legal requirement placed upon the Government to maintain the local post office network.
Ten post offices have closed in Aberavon between 1999 and 2006.
Under the Government’s plans an average of three to four more post offices per constituency will close.
Read MoreThailand Post to expand types of services
Thailand Post will soon be more than just a post office. It will be offering a range of one-stop services for business and individual customers, The Nation reports.
Woodtipong Moleechad, chief operations officer for the company, said the agency would utilise new information technology to upgrade its “back-end” infrastructure in ways that will improve existing services and provide new ones.
It will also invest aboutd Bt500 million to implement “enterprise resource planning” to increase productivity.
“Customers in the near future will be able to pay for almost any business transaction at the post office, which has 1,178 branches nationwide,” said Woodtipong.
The firm is negotiating with banks to offer business transactions at post office counters, where customers will also be able to deposit and withdraw money. Kiosks will be installed to provide existing and new services.
“The new services will make life comfortable for customers. They will no longer need to go to a bank. They will just go to the post office branch near their home. They can do any transaction without transport,” said Woodtipong.
The firm will provide a “warehouse management system” as a new service for large organisations, using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology.
He said the new system would help staff reduce the time customers’ products are in storage before being sent to the destination, as the RFID readers will enhance efficiency.
The RFID tag will record information such as who owns the products, the date, time and destinations and how many product items there are.
Read MorePitney Bowes leaders describe global business opportunities
Dramatic changes in technologies, regulations and customer preferences are reinventing the global mailstream, and the top management of Pitney Bowes Inc. said today this means new growth opportunities for the 87-year-old company.
President and Chief Operating Officer Murray Martin, who becomes Pitney Bowes’ new CEO on May 14, told investors and analysts that the growth strategies that were put in place several years ago are working, and the company remains committed to expansion in the fastest-growing segments of the global mailstream.
“Over a quarter of our total revenue comes from businesses acquired since 2001, and the growth rate for these businesses is roughly double the growth rate for the businesses we were in when we began,” Martin said. “We think that the new businesses could constitute more than 50 percent of our revenue by the end of the decade.”
Martin outlined six strategic priorities for Pitney Bowes: maintain and grow the company’s healthy cash flow; increase value delivered to customers; improve operating efficiency; solidify the performance of the core mailing business; expand internationally; and focus on high-growth areas of the mailstream.
“Postal reform is complex,” Critelli said, “but in the aggregate it will be highly beneficial to Pitney Bowes. It allows the Postal Service to respond flexibly to the rapidly-changing needs of senders and recipients through market-driven dynamic pricing, frequent price adjustments, and lots of product and service innovation. This is an optimal environment for Pitney Bowes.”
Postal liberalization in Europe is proceeding more slowly and on a country-by-country basis, Critelli said. He asserted that Pitney Bowes has “winning strategies” that will serve the company well in “this highly divergent” environment. These strategies include a focus on small- and medium-size business customers, partnering with national posts for cross—border mail delivery, and selling more advanced systems for online postage and self-service postal kiosks.
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