INTTRA’s transaction growth outpaces container volumes

Inna Kuznetsova, president and chief operating officer of INTTRA, explained the reasons behind the company’s rapid growth in a recent interview with American Shipper.    Ocean shipping e-commerce platform INTTRA said it handled 15 percent more transactions in 2016 than in 2015.
   For the first half of 2016, INTTRA’s transactions were up 17 percent year-over-year.
   INTTRA’s transaction growth has grown at a much faster pace than physical cargo volumes. Danish shipping bank Danmarks Skibskredit (Danish Ship Finance) estimated in its annual review of seaborne container trade that volumes grew just 2.6 percent in 2016. INTTRA President and Chief Operating Officer Inna Kuznetsova told American Shipper in an interview she has seen a range of estimates from various analysts regarding container volumes growth in 2016, spanning from 1.5 percent to 3.5 percent for the full year.
   Kuznetsova said INTTRA’s rapid growth in transactions has resulted from the work it has done in developing solutions for its customers, combined with the fact that carriers, shippers, and service providers to the industry are “adopting IT technology faster.”
   The company had its 15th anniversary of its creation last year, but half the industry is still performing bookings and shipping instructions manually, using phones, fax and email, Kuznetsova said.
   However, most leading ocean carriers already support INTTRA, and the company saw some additional small Asian carriers join its portal in the past year.
   Kuznetsova said there has been a big switch from a few years ago, when some Asian carriers preferred manual processes, because this was cheaper than using computer systems like INTTRA. However, the adoption of digital platforms has increased with rising labor costs, and because of expectations by shippers – especially big global shippers and freight forwarders – that they use digital processes.
   Freight forwarders are particularly enthusiastic adopters of INTTRA because they work with many carriers, have narrow margins and are looking to improve operational efficiency, she said.
   INTTRA says it connects over 225,000 shipping professionals with more than 45 leading carriers and 110 software companies and industry organizations. Each month, nearly three million container orders are initiated on INTTRA’s platform, representing about 27 percent of global ocean container trade.
   Kuznetsova said shipper adoption of INTTRA has been the key to the rapid growth. “What we see happening is more and more customers switching from doing business manually to starting to do business digitally,” she said. “This is where the largest portion of INTTRA’s growth is coming from.” The use of IT technology really comes to the forefront, especially now when the pressure on margins is unbelievably high and an increasing amount of shippers and carriers are forced to look at all possible ways to cut costs and eliminate waste in the system, she explained.
   Kuznetsova also said more and more customers understand that replacing phone calls and emails with standard digital submissions can be useful at a time when they need to improve profitability. INTTRA can do that by reducing the amount of time carriers and shipper employees spend on the phone, speeding processing through the submission data in standard formats and reducing human errors in data submissions, she said.
   Shippers can use the INTTRA portal to conduct business rather than using the websites of individual carriers, and the portal can allow them to reduce the number of EDI connections they need to maintain. It allows them to standardize processes within their own companies to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency.
   Products such as INTTRA’s “decision support dashboards” can also make it easier to analyze shipment arrivals and plan time sensitive shipments. One new dashboard rolled out last year analyzes dwell time and can help shippers reduce detention and demurrage charges, while another INTTRA tool aims to help companies improve container tracking.
   INTTRA introduced a service last year to allow shippers and forwarders to transmit information on the verified gross mass (VGM) of loaded containers to carriers in order to comply with IMO regulations.
   Kuznetsova noted that enforcement of VGM regulations varies from country to country. Reportedly, enforcement is high in Europe, but in Asia, there has been less enforcement. She said some countries did not do heavy enforcement during peak season to avoid supply chain disruption.
   “However, at the same time, we see certain countries growing very fast in the use of the product and it may be the sign of a higher attention being put into compliance,” she said. INTTRA has heard from carriers that over 90 percent of all VGM submissions come in digital form, some using the INTTRA portal and other shippers supplying the information directly to carriers.