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The first quarter of 2019 has just passed, and major events that may bring profound impact and even disruption to the entire international freight forwarding industry have happened one after another in these three months, making many industry insiders can not help but cry, is the day of international freight forwarding really going to change? DSV announced the acquisition of Panalpina for 4.65 billion US dollars. After the merger, the new company was renamed AS DSV Panalpina A/S, and its business scale entered the top three in the world. SoftBank Vision Fund led the investment in India's innovative logistics company Delhivery, Fosun International, Carlyle and other companies to invest, this round of total investment of 413 million DOLLARS, the company's valuation reached 1.5 billion dollars; German logistics giant Rhenus announced the acquisition of South Africa-based logistics group Worldnet. Earlier this year, Rhenus announced the acquisition of Canadian logistics firm Rodair and Italian logistics firm Cesped. The world famous third party logistics company, The United States Zhigao Logistics MIQ announced to be acquired by the Spanish logistics company Noatum; Uber officially announced the expansion of its Freight business to Europe. It will open an office of Uber Freight in the Netherlands, and at the same time, it plans to cooperate with giants like DSV and Kuehne+Nagel. Flexport, a technology freight forwarding company based in Silicon Valley, received a new round of investment of us $1 billion, led by SoftBank Vision Fund, followed by SF and Founders Fund, etc., with the company's valuation reaching US $3.2 billion. Coatue, a one-stop international logistics service platform, announced that it had secured Coatue of tens of millions of US dollars in a round of Coatue financing led by longtime shareholders DCM, China Merchants Venture Capital and source capital; Maersk announced the acquisition of Vandegrift, the top customs broker in North America, to strengthen the service capacity of its Global CHB business subunit in North America. CMA CGM announced that it would acquire a larger stake in Kewha Logistics CEVA from the open market, hoping to become a majority shareholder in the company and expand further into non-marine services to provide customers with more complete solutions by controlling the entire supply chain. 
Unprecedented dense massive investment and the enterprise merger and acquisition, reflect the capital market to high attention in the field of international logistics and industry companies seek breakthrough, desperate to occupy the advantageous competitive position, behind is the Internet economy from consumer Internet enters industry of the Internet, the trend of The Times, and the Internet technology ABCDI (artificial intelligence, chain blocks, cloud computing, big data, Internet of things) close to the technological singularity could lead to disruptive changes of the international logistics industry layout in advance. According to the analysis of BCG Group, there are five types of companies that are attacking the structure and traditional freight forwarders of the freight forwarding industry: 1) emerging startups (such as Flexport, Freightos, Buyco); 2) Incubate competitors of the new model (e.g. Twill); 3) Suppliers on the digital stage (such as Maersk); 4) Integrated service providers entering the logistics market (such as DHL and UPS); 5) Customers who join the ranks of competitors (such as Amazon and Alibaba). However, we all share the same goal to solve the following major pain points in the shipping logistics industry and ultimately improve efficiency and reduce costs:
A. The tariff is not transparent and fluctuates frequently;
B. Lack of security of accommodation and lack of mutual trust;
C. The process chain is long and the links are complex;
D. The transport status of goods is not transparent and information feedback is not timely;
E. Repeated input of information, low degree of digitization, disjointed document management;
F. Long payment cycle, easy to make mistakes, and customers have capital requirements; Strictly speaking, this wave is the second wave of capital and the Internet to try to restructure (disrupt) the international logistics industry. You if I have some impression, in late 2014 / early 2015 has sprung up a batch of domestic shipping electric business platform, including giants such as alibaba, China shipping, cosco, has also attracted the IDG venture capital, financial institutions, such as today, the most of this platform has disappeared, and above the pain did not get much effective solution, why? As a witness of the whole process, the author believes that there are mainly the following reasons: B2B platform can not rely on money subsidies for customer stickiness, also can not afford to burn; The platform price cannot be truly transparent (in order to avoid the competition between peers, customers of different orders have different requirements on the price, and the conflict between the online price and the original offline sales price system); It will take a long time to change user habits. For example, the customer operators are unwilling to input the existing information in the enterprise ERP system into the freight forwarding system platform again, and they are still used to send booking booking through email or QQ. For matchmaking platform, its biggest value lies in the guidance flow. However, matchmaking platform is most prone to one-off transaction, that is, once the transaction is successful and the customer approves the service of this supplier, the subsequent business can be directly connected, and there is no need to pass through the platform again. Unless the platform has some core value, the two parties of the transaction cannot easily leave, similar to what Alipay does to Taobao; It is neither realistic nor necessary to build a unified operating platform. From the perspective of the entire supply chain, the systems that may be involved at least include trade management system, order management system, freight forwarding operating system, transportation management system, warehouse management system, customs declaration system, etc. The key points of each system are different, and the information between different systems is generated or input by different links according to the time sequence of the operation process, and the operation chain is formed by interlocking, which cannot be replaced by each other. For the same batch of goods, even if part of the content can be Shared, it still faces the problems of different information of main sub-orders, information switching between Chinese and English (bill of lading, manifest) and other difficulties, and the lack of effective docking between systems. Most of the so-called information islands are caused by the lack of unified coordination between government departments and industry authorities (customs, commodity inspection, ports, docks, shipping companies, etc.), that is, information is too dispersed rather than lacking. If the information interface cannot be opened up from top to bottom, it will be difficult for the platform enterprises to get through completely. Although the visualization of goods transportation status can be realized manually, which is of certain value to customers, the efficiency has not been effectively improved from the perspective of the whole supply chain. Freight rates and shipping space are ultimately controlled by shipping companies/airlines, and the freight forwarding platform's pricing and other operational strategies cannot affect their interests, or they will inevitably be ruthlessly blocked. On the other hand, it is an inevitable trend for shipping companies to launch direct online booking platform. Maersk, CMA and other companies have taken the lead in the market. Only using online price display, price comparison and online booking platform as selling points will lose competitiveness. Forwarder platform supporting the development direction of the future is to do, to provide comprehensive supply chain solutions, door to door, warehousing, sorting, supply chain finance and other value-added services, especially in the present stage, the import and export of small and medium-sized enterprise loan, loan your problem is customer's greater pain points, suited to the characteristics of the industry supply chain financial model is still in groping.
Although the above problems still need to be solved, various participants in the international freight forwarding industry have made more adequate preparations in terms of ideas, capital and technology, etc. In the future, more cases of investment, acquisition and merger can be foreseen. International freight forwarding industry is about to be overthrown. Are you ready?
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