With the difficult economic environment stretching to all corners of the world, it seems that every person and every company has been affected in one way or another. Most of the effects have of course been negative, but for a lot of companies and individuals the difficult economic environment has brought a lot of opportunities. IB Cargo has chosen to focus on the opportunities of the new, more challenging economic environment.

With the decline in overall cargo volume, air and ocean freight costs have fallen to levels not seen in many years. While this is resulting in huge economic losses for the air and sea shipping lines, it is an advantage for freight forwarders, especially small and medium sized forwarders like IB Cargo. The lower rates have taken away historically problematic issues such as lack of space and leveled out the playing field. IB Cargo is now able to compete for large accounts that were previously out of reach. Customers in these large companies that have never heard of us before are now interested in talking with us. In addition, some companies only want cheap freight costs and are as concerned about transit time as they were in the past, while other companies are taking advantage of the lower freight costs by using high-end carriers that would have been considered too expensive in the past. Still other companies require flexibility and combination of both options. The advantage of IB Cargo is that we can offer competitive rates for both the low and high-end carriers.

IB Cargo is being very aggressive on the pricing side and continuously pushing the carriers to provide us with the best possible rates. We are also taking care to sell smartly and make sure we have business on hand so that we can follow up carrier rate negotiations with real cargo bookings. We sometimes approach our partner’s pricing departments in Asia that are especially skilled at this balancing act.

Other measures we have taken include a renewed push in sales. Since many companies are not as busy as in the past, shipping managers now have more time to talk with us. Customers whose volumes are currently small appreciate the customer service and personalized attention we provide to them. We know that when the world economies start to grow again we will also grow with our customers. With a focus on sales, exports as well as imports in sea and airfreight, we are actually expanding our customer base and also bringing export volumes closer to a balance with the strong import volumes.

Finally, IB Cargo has been focusing on joint development of accounts with our overseas partners. Even though most freight decisions are made at destination, by focusing on customer service and relationships with shippers at origin, we have been able to win new accounts that we believe we will be able to keep for the long term. The combination of simultaneous sales efforts at both origin and destination has proven to be a very effective strategy.