Egypt one of the top performers in DHL’s books

CAIRO: “The Middle East and North Africa were in much better shape than business in other parts. The decline was much smaller than in Asia, the US or Europe,” said Frank Appel, CEO of DHL, at a recent conference in Cairo.

DHL revenues were down during the downturn, but the company managed to gain larger market share, which would give it quite good leverage going forward, said Appel. He declined to give numbers for DHL’s performance in 2009, but mentioned that the revenue for last year is a sizeable double digit number.

“Egypt in our numbers was an exception,” said Appel, explaining that the country performed better than many countries in the Middle East.

Many company clients continued using the DHL services with the same intensity despite the crisis.

“The textile industry, which was down across a lot of markets, seemed to ride it out in Egypt,” said Garry Kemp, managing director of DHL Express for Middle East, North Africa and Turkey.

“The types of businesses that use express services are companies that send samples around the world to generate and develop business,” he added.

The financial sector also performed relatively well for DHL. Although business from international banks shrank, Egyptian and African banks held up.

“Logistics is a hidden champion. Not many people talk about logistics because it’s much more exciting to talk about the iPhone or cars, but our industry has proven very important to the development of any country,” said Appel.

Facilitating trade in and out of customs directly leads to faster growth of GDP, he added.

Recognizing the potential of the Egyptian market, DHL has expanded its services to match local demand. DHL Express recently expanded the domestic network to compliment its international services. Currently, the company has achieved 90 percent coverage of Egypt’s territory with services provided in 36 offices by 500 employees.

To match the growing Egyptian pharmaceutical industry, DHL is currently providing special warehouse and shipping environments with temperature control. For the high-tech industry, which has also undergone significant growth, DHL has small and efficient warehouses which plug the shipments directly into the express network.

EasyShop is another service recently introduced to the Egyptian market. It allows customers to order items on the internet from websites like Amazon and Ebay and then to get them shipped via DHL Express to Egypt.

With expanding services in the Middle East, DHL is making the region a priority. “Going forward we will see our major investments exactly in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia,” said Appel.

The new Strategy 2015 that DHL recently announced will also influence its operations here.

“In our Strategy 2015, we are talking less about buying or selling companies or doing major re-organizations or restructuring and much more about unlocking the potential we brought together [by] acquiring a lot of companies along the road,” said Appel.

He explained that to boost its revenues DHL will rely on simplifying its customers’ experience and enhancing employees’ motivation to perform better. 

“In the services industry you are successful only with highly-motivated people because they want customer satisfaction. That altogether drives your financial success,” he said.

Appel shared his predictions that technology will be one of the main drivers of the logistics industry and Asia — one of the biggest consumers. He also pointed out that megacities will be a huge challenge in the next decades.

“Traffic jams and pollution are a big challenge. There is an increasing amount of cities of the size of Cairo and we have to find new answers to that problem,” he said.

Another issue gaining more attention across all industries is global warming. Two years ago DHL launched its own green program. “We committed ourselves to reduce our carbon emissions by 2012 by 10 percent and 2020 by 30 percent,” Appel said.

“Our industry has now defined a standard to measure carbon emission per product. It is not perfect yet but it is definitely in the right direction,” he added.