Air Freight News :

France Government slaps price-fixing fines on 20 express carriers/Logistic Companies including few MNC’s :

France’s Competition Authority (Autorité de la Concurrence, FCA) has ordered 20 parcels delivery firms to pay a total €672.3m for price-fixing.

Some 20 companies including Chronopost, Exapaq (now DPD France), Dachser France, DHL Express France, FedEx Express France, Gefco, Geodis, GLS France, Norbert Dentressangle Distribution, Schenker-Joyau (now Schenker France), TNT Express France and Ziegler France were fined for price-fixing between September 2004 and September 2010.

Most of the offences took place under the auspices of the TLF professional grouping, which has also been fined. FCA said that TLF organised regular round table meetings that allowed the companies to standardise their tariffs. Discussions were kept secret and not officially recorded.

There were both bilateral and multilateral exchanges. It added that TLF, far from acting as a competition watchdog, had actively participated in the price fixing and then covered it up. In arriving at the fines, FCA said that it had taken into account the duration of the price-fixing and the economic damage caused, particularly to small and medium sized enterprises.

However, it had reduced fines by over 90% to take into account the current financial situation of six firms: Ciblex , Heppner, Lambert and Valletta, XP France, Transport Henri Ducros and Ziegler and also agreements not to contest sanctions. 

Among the larger fines levied were Chronopost (€99m), DHL Express France (€81m) and Geodis (€196m).

In its own statement, TNT said that it had been ordered to pay a €58m fine.  TNT had co-operated with the investigation since it started in 2010 and, during the third quarter of 2014, had entered into a settlement agreement with the FCA and made provision for €50m in its accounts. It added that it would “review the merits of the decision.”

Kuehne + Nagel quickly distanced itself from the activities of French Alloin Group, a company which it acquired in 2009. It said that €31m of the €32m fine imposed on the were attributable to the time before its takeover.

Astra Zeneca on course for pharma modal shift to ocean from air..

Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca (AZ) is still on course for a modal shift from air to sea that will see 70% of its products transported by ocean within two years.  But Julian Wann, global category manager, freight and logistics at AZ, said airfreight will still have an important role to play in its global supply chain.

Wann told an Air Cargo News pharma conference in London: “As we evolve, our business is going to change but we will still need to have airfreight. “Our business driver, though, is to maintain that growth in ocean freight, and we still intend to get to 70% of volumes by sea in the next 12 to 18 months, if we can.”

Ocean freight has been slowly gaining market share versus airfreight at AZ, building on a less than 40% share in the past two years.

e-AWB target of 56% by end of 2016 says IATA

IATA Cargo Bureau has set a 56% target for electronic air waybill (e-AWB) usage by the end of 2016, despite missing the 45% target for 2015.  In October this year, the figure for e-AWB penetration was just 35.1% but Guillaume Drucy, IATA’s head of cargo e-business management, remained hopeful that ratio would lay between 38%-40% by the end of December.

Drucy said: “That is still short of the industry target of 45% but it is a very respectable growth figure for the industry which now has a monthly growth rate now of between 1%-1.5%.”  He added that widespread e-AWB usage was “one of the key areas if air cargo is to move into the digital world. We have reduced the reliance on paper by greater use of e-freight. We still have a lot of work to do but we are nearly half-way in that endeavour.”

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