Steadfast Delivery

Farian Kirana aims to grow Lion Parcel to a Rp 1 trillion company and take it public.

- Yessar Rosendar

With its red-colored lion logo, it’s not hard to recognize PT Lion Express, or Lion Parcel, as a part of the Lion Air Group, the country’s largest low-cost airline company. Although many believe that the company only delivers cargo for Lion Air, in reality it has developed into a full-fledged logistic company providing end-to-end services to retail consumers for bulk and international deliveries.

As an up and coming logistics company, business is developing strongly for Lion Parcel. Revenue almost reached Rp 1 trillion last year and it aims to grow 40% in 2021, in part boosted by the ecommerce boom due to the pandemic. During the first quarter this year, the company increased its deliveries by 30% to 1.5 million packages.

Being a part of the Lion Group gives the company a significant advantage as it has more flexibility through using the group’s fleet of aircraft and scheduled service, enabling it to deliver packages faster nationwide. About 90% of its deliveries can be done in one day; only districts that have to be reached by land require two days.

“What makes us different is we have our planes; when you have the planes, then the flexibility comes,” shares Farian Kirana, CEO of Lion Parcel.

The company has several strategies that underpin its success aside from using the Lion Group’s fleet of aircraft. Unlike a typical logistic company, Lion Parcel has a lean business model that helped it navigate the challenging times amidst the pandemic. It uses a similar business model to ridehailing apps such as Gojek and Grab, in that all of its couriers are outsourced and commissionbased; the company only has around 1,000 employees and who primarily work in Jakarta, where the company is headquartered.