Reuters, London :
If suppliers in China fail to pick up freight containers to fill an order for MediaShop, Marcel Schneider gets an alert via a digital freight system, allowing the retailer to reach out and fix the problem swiftly.
Before July 2020, Austria-based MediaShop’s deputy supply chain director says he would discover problems in his supply chain only when containers failed to arrive in Hamburg as scheduled.
“It was like being in a tunnel where you had only a limited view of what was going on,” Schneider said.
Lost containers means lost sales for MediaShop, which sells consumer goods ranging from kitchen knives to fitness equipment. A missing load can mean the company pays penalties to wholesale customers for late shipments.
Global supply chain snarls, from shortages of freight containers in China to a blockage in the Suez Canal, have thrown a wrench into the recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.
They have also accelerated the freight industry’s shift out of the digital dark ages. That’s benefiting a fast-growing cluster of startup companies that had struggled to sell their software-powered freight tracking technology, until now.
A Reuters analysis of digital freight startups shows there are close to 250 companies globally, including Uber’s logistics arm Uber Freight, and some Chinese operators looking to go public like Full Truck Alliance.
“Really, the pandemic gave us a chance to shine, with capacity being taken offline and demand surging in unpredictable ways,” says Ryan Petersen, Chief Executive Officer of San Francisco-based Flexport, a freight forwarder whose revenue almost doubled to $1.27 billion last year and which has raised $1.3 billion from investors. MediaShop is a client.
Digitization in the freight industry has been under way for years, but the expense of grafting digital tracking systems onto legacy databases has discouraged many companies. Now, a number of startups staffed by alumni of tech companies like Facebook, Amazon and Uber have developed platforms that integrate with customers’ transportation management systems, making them easy to use from home.
“We have seen a massive acceleration in products that normally wouldn’t have been adopted for three, four or five years from now because people have had to figure out how to operate remotely,” said Sune Stilling, former head of growth at the venture capital arm of shipping giant Maersk, which has invested in several of these startups.
