In early July European logistics firm Rhenus, a €4.8 billion (US$5.7 billion) behemoth with more than 580 locations around the world, moved to establish a presence covering Australia with the agreement to acquire local forwarder O’Brien Customs and Forwarding for an undisclosed sum. Family-owned O’Brien, which is headquartered in Melbourne, provides air and sea freight forwarding as well as customs clearance and warehousing.

“The takeover of O’Brien and the founding of the national company to be known as Rhenus Logistics Australia enable us to cover the whole of Australia with our services,” said Jan Harnisch, COO ocean freight Asia.

Rhenus management’s ambitions go well beyond the Australian market. The acquisition of O’Brien is one of a series of steps taken this year to build up its footprint in the Asia-Pacific region. Rhenus has been pursuing an aggressive growth strategy that has seen expansion in Europe and South America, but the Asia-Pacific region looms head and shoulders above these as a target for growth.

This year Rhenus has opened new branches in two locations in the Philippines and one each in South Korea, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. Before the end of the year the company plans further expansion in China, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines. Altogether it will open about 15 new offices in the region in 2017.

Two of the new locations will be Hanoi and Nanjing, said Tobias Bartz, a member of the company’s executive board. Rhenus already has a presence in the Vietnamese capital, but it concentrates on project cargo, and management is eager to build up its general cargo service there.

The company also has its eyes on Laos and Cambodia as well as on Bangladesh, he revealed.

Rhenus has kept up a blistering pace of expansion for some time now, with two-digit openings of new offices per year. According to Bartz, this is fuelled by the company’s clients. It is not for the sake of rapid expansion per se, he stressed.

General cargo is the chief engine of this growth, but some verticals are playing a major part in this. “We have always been strong in chemicals and automotive,” said Bartz.

The basic gateway structure in the region is in place, with Hong Kong and Singapore as the hubs for traffic flows. At this point the focus is on building up the major points in the individual countries, offering more options to route cargo, to be followed by expansion within national markets at a later stage, Bartz said.

With its strength in Europe, the chief focus is on flows between its home market and the Asia-Pacific region. Bartz emphasised that Rhenus has focused strongly on the integration of its European network over the past couple of years, which gives the company an edge over rivals moving cargo from Asia to Europe.

The most recent move on that front was the establishment of a regional LCL hub in the German city of Hilden. “We use our dense European road network to speed up the LCL network,” Bartz said.

The push into the Asia-Pacific region aims beyond flows to and from Europe, though. Alongside air and ocean freight forwarding, Rhenus is bent on developing its overland capabilities, especially in Southeast Asia. This year the company opened a cross-dock facility for road freight in Thailand.

The overall objective is to “close the supply chain” by implementing the company’s product portfolio, including road transportation and contract logistics, Bartz said. Rolling out the portfolio is one of the three main thrusts of the Asian expansion, besides building up long-haul and intra-regional traffic, he added.

For the most part, the expansion drive has been through organic growth and the opening of new offices, but takeovers are a strategic plank in this, provided the targeted companies match the Rhenus set up. Bartz said that acquired firms are given much leeway (“they were successful, that’s why we bought them,” he commented), while moving to a more harmonized system for the network.

More acquisitions are looming. “We are constantly on the look-out to grow by M&A,” said Bartz. “We will keep adding stations,” he added.

By Ian Putzger

Air Freight Correspondent | Toronto