Becoming bigger player in forwarding game

Becoming bigger player in forwarding game    The bright red trucks of Norbert Dentressangle are a common sight on European roads, so much so that the Wikipedia entry on the company is largely devoted to the rules of a spotting game, 'Nobby, Nobby,' that bored children and their parents can play ' two points for every one of the firm's lorries they see, three for a reefer, four for a double trailer, five for a tanker.
   There are plenty of opportunities to spy Nobbies. With 8,000 tractor units and 11,000 trailers, it has Europe's largest wholly owned fleet.
   Don't look for the company's trucks on U.S. roads anytime soon, but Lyon, France-headquartered Norbert Dentressangle has expanded here in a big way with its Nov. 1 purchase of Schneider Logistics' freight forwarding, custom brokerage and non-vessel-operating common carrier business. The business it is acquiring had annual revenues of about $29 million.
   The U.S. operation will use the name NDO America (NDO is for Norbert Dentressangle Overseas), and it plans to offer global service.
   When Schneider announced the sale ' it included forwarding and brokerage operations in both the United States and China ' it said it had 'become clear that while freight forwarding and customs brokerage is an exciting business with significant potential, it is not part of the strategic focus on our core truckload, logistics and intermodal services.'
   But for Norbert Dentressangle, the acquisition is part of a plan to expand in forwarding, adding a third stream of revenue to its transport and logistics-warehousing sectors.
   Norbert Dentressangle followed up its Schneider acquisition in December with an even bigger deal, acquiring Laxey Logistics, which owns TDG, the Manchester, England-headquartered transport and logistics company.
   TDG makes 74 percent of its revenue in the United Kingdom, 12 percent in the Benelux countries, 8.5 percent in Spain and the remainder in Ireland, Germany and Hungary. Like Norbert Dentressangle, most of TDG's revenue comes from trucking and warehousing, but 14 percent of its 795 million euros ($1 billion) in 2009 revenue came from its forwarding operations.
   Many of Norbert Dentressangle's customers throughout Europe are 'multinationals that have a presence in the states and Asia as well. They have asked for quite some time for Norbert to have a footprint in the states,' said Diane Hofman, general manager of NDO American. She comes from Schneider, where she had been running the forwarding and brokerage operation.
   Schneider customers have migrated to NDO with the acquisition and are 'quite excited about this because it gives them a greater global footprint,' Hofman said. NDO will continue to closely work with Schneider so its U.S. customers' warehousing, trucking and transloading requirements will continue to be met.
   NDO America has offices in seven U.S. cities ' Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Diego and San Francisco ' and 'we are expecting to open a few more offices throughout the U.S. over time,' she said.
   The Schneider acquisition included operations in Shanghai and Tianjin, China. That's already been supplemented with an office in Hong Kong. Norbert Dentressangle Overseas also has offices in Europe.
   The TDG purchase 'will give us some great opportunities because there is so much business that goes on between the U.S. and the U.K.,' Hofman said.
   Norbert Dentressangle, which takes its name from its founder, was founded in 1979 and initially was an international trucking company specializing in cross-channel traffic. The company opened branches in Italy, Spain and the Benelux countries and expanded in the late 1980s and early 1990s by acquiring 30 companies.
   It became a public company in 1994 and since then has expanded in the services it offers by getting into logistics and warehousing, and geographically by establishing operations throughout Western and Eastern Europe.
   It continued to grow in the 1990s and during the past decade by purchasing firms throughout Europe: Confluent, UTL, Van Mierlo, Stockalliance, Cidem, Venditelli, TNT Logistics France, Transcondor, CCH and Christian Salvasen.
   With the acquisition of TDG, Norbert Dentressangle will have 2010 pro forma revenue of 3.6 billion euros ($4.8 billion), 57 percent from outside France. It has 33,000 employees, 58 percent outside of France. About 53 percent of the company's revenue will come from road transport, 44 percent from logistics (the company has about 70 million square feet of warehouse space), and 3 percent from forwarding like the business it acquired from Schneider.' Chris Dupin

INTTRA adds shipper-NVO business
   Shipping portal INTTRA said Dec. 7 it is opening its window to the customers of non-vessel-operating common carriers, giving a big new group of shippers access to its product.
   INTTRA, which is used to initiate more than 350,000 container orders per week, estimates NVOs handle 34 percent of full containerload shipments and 74 percent of less-than-containerload shipments, a total of about 50 million TEUs of cargo.
   The actual number of NVOs is difficult to estimate; INTTRA said its research gives a range of 10,000 to 30,000 globally. The middlemen, which buy lift from container shipping companies and then resell to shippers, can be big or small. But smaller shippers' NVOs consolidate smaller lots into containers, offering a shipping service analogous to less-than-truckload shipping.
   While 81 of the top 100 NVOs already use INTTRA's electronic systems like other shippers to exchange information with container liner companies, NVOs will also be able to do business with their customers on the network.
   NVOs will 'be able to participate as both a sender of data or a shipper, and as a carrier as a receiver of data,' said Robert Haney, director of NVO product management at INTTRA. 'It really completes the picture if you think about the supply chain breaking down into shippers and the NVOs and then the steamship lines ' those are the three big pieces and this gives us an opportunity to really make it more valuable to all three.'
   Shippers, he said, would benefit from a single point of entry through which they can initiate and manage both full container and LCL shipments.
   INTTRA will sign up NVOs globally to do business with shippers, he said. Shippers will be able to perform all the functions they perform today with vessel operators when they use INTTRA to do business with NVOs, and eventually the company plans to let them post schedules on its Web site, www.OceanSchedules.com. ' Chris Dupin