DIGITALISE AND REDUCE LOGISTICS COST

The last year has seen Maersk evolve into an end-to-end logistics solution provider. Moving forward, the focus should be to reduce logistics cost in the overall GDP and facilitate faster adoption of technology by government and other key industry stakeholders, reveals Steve Felder, Managing Director, Maersk South Asia

Q. How has been your business in 2019? What were the major achievements and challenges?

In 2019, our focus has been on moving beyond shipping and expanding our outreach across the supply chain to provide end-toend logistics. And in reaching this goal, we have led many initiatives in the past year. y In our efforts to bring down the costs of logistics, we partnered with BlackBuck, India’s largest trucking platform by digitizing containerised trucking and increasing accessibility and reach.

In order to provide better customer experience, we introduced new product offerings such as Maersk Spot, which is an online portal that ensures transparency on bookings and pricing to customers, offers instant booking and guarantees loading. Overall, this product offering was significant in improving reliability, achieving higher customer satisfaction and promoting ease of doing business.

Value Protect is another product we launched for our customers to extend our liability and reduce cargo risk.

We even launched Maersk Accelerate, a premium service which shows transit benefits and overheads reduction. This offering gave us an opportunity to deliver on our capabilities & execute premium offering at a controlled scale.

In terms of expanding trade opportunities, we achieved the following: y We piloted cargo on the newly inaugurated National Waterways –1, thereby tapping into multimodal transportation by moving cargo from Varanasi to Kolkata, and from Kochi to Kattayam.

We also notably opened opportunities for refrigerated or reefer cargo for international and domestic trade with our first-mile delivery reefer service to transport butter from Uttar Pradesh to Turkey and with successful shipping of mangoes from Nhava Sheva, Mumbai to Felixstowe in London.