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India’s online international freight exchange Cogoport is all set to expand its operations globally by opening two more overseas offices in China and at Amsterdam, Netherlands, by March. The company is looking at the new opportunities opened by the Government of India’s port-related development policies, Kunal Rathore, Co-founder and Head of Business Development, told BusinessLine .
Launched in May 2016, Cogoport is an aggregator of freight services using technology to make a cost-effective match between exporters and importers on one hand and ocean and air freight carriers on the other,
The Government-certified startup, aspiring to be the ‘Flipkart of logistics’, has offices at Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Rajkot, Gandhidham and Gurugram, and Hong Kong. In February, its Delhi-NCR office will be opened and by mid-2018, it plans to expand across other cities in India, he said.
Cogoport enables price comparison for trucking, custom and inland docking charges. Combining technology and data, the platform takes into account millions of line items such as prices, transit times, vessel details for one lakh port pairs across the world and hundreds of suppliers, among other variables, to discover the best freight rates for customers by offering price comparison across players. It allows customers to compare rates and book shipment as well as track it online.
With Cogoport’s logistics portal, merchants can plan their shipments in advance, enabling efficiencies. The company also offers door-to- door services by way of price comparisons for trucking, custom charges and inland docking charges from the same platform, Rathore added.
Purnendu Shekhar, Founder and CEO, said many logistics service providers face challenges in the fragmented market. Due to its opaque structure, the impact is on adding cost for the customers as well as sub-optimal capacity utilisation for freight companies.
The global logistics market is currently estimated at around $3.5 trillion. India spends around 14.4 per cent of its GDP on logistics and transportation compared to less than 8 per cent by the other developing countries. India’s freight transport market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.35 per cent by 2020.
Cogoport has clocked an annual run rate of $10 million so far, with ocean freight accounting for 95 per cent of it.
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