A sea of containers

36 Million 20-foot containers (TEUs) were moved through the port of Shanghai last year. In the world’s biggest port, the very physical nature of international trade is apparent like nowhere else.

Globally, 130 million containers are shipped across the seas year after year – of which Panalpina handled 1.6 million for its customers in 2014. At the beginning of this year, Daryl Ridgway took over as Panalpina’s new global head of Ocean Freight.

As one of the world’s leading third-party logistics providers (3PL), Panalpina also handled 860,000 tons of air freight in 2014. Roughly 15% of these volumes were routed through the company’s unique Charter Network. In addition, we specialize in outsized and heavy lift transports, for example in the energy sector. Logistics is another core product of the company besides Air and Ocean Freight.

Panalpina’s logistics experts are exploring game-changing technologies such as data analytics and 3D printing. The objective is to reduce the inventories of customers as much as possible and to optimize the flow of products as well as manufacturing processes.

In the recent two-part blog post “Making the physical digital”, Mike Wilson, global head of logistics, and Christoph Lienhard, corporate head of customer systems, highlighted five major trends that are shaping the freight forwarding and logistics industry – all of them linked to digital transformation.

One conclusion: Digital transformation isn’t just about the flow of information; it has a massive impact on the flow of physical goods, too.

You can read the blog post "Making the physical digital" in the Newsroom (see below) or watch this two-minute to get a first impression of what digitization can do for 3PL customers.