Country’s leading logistics service provider, DHl Express laid down its investment plan for the coming five years. While talking to The Pioneer, DHl Express India’s Country Head, RS Subramanian pointed out that their parent company, DHl plans to invest nearly $300 million into the India operations in the coming five years.
Talking about the company’s expansion plan, Subramanian said, “Investment would happen in three broader segments. One, we are working on expanding our existing facilities around the country and along with it also plan to open new service centers and retail outlets. All this is being done to increase our reach across the country. Secondly, we are also working on upgrading our technology. And lastly, the company plans to invest in skill development of our employees.”
The company recently announced a price rise of 9.9 per cent in the 220 countries it is operational in. While giving the reasons behind the steep price hike, he said, “Currency depreciation is not a new phenomena but this time rupee fell sharply, which has a huge impact on us. 60- 70 per cent of all our costs are incurred in dollars and, thus we had to pass a small portion of burden to customers. Going forward we expect the currency to fall by nearly 10- 15 per cent.” He further added that rupee depreciation was not the only cause due to which the company raised the fares. High inflation and rise in infrastructure costs were also adding pressure on the company.
Tapping opportunities from the fast growing segments has been the key to DHl Express’s business strategy and now the company has shifted its focus to the jewellery sector and the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector. “Gems and jewelry has a big stake in India’s export basket and the sector has great potential. Recently, we also started providing our services to the growing sector and are focused on growing our customer base in the same. We have some contracts from jewellery manufactures and are working on providing customised services to them.” Subramanian added.
As far as SMEs are concerned, he said that DHl expects strong growth from country’s SME sector and are devising new plans to suit them. “In the last 3- 4 years SMEs have become a very big component to our business. It total it is nearly contributing 40 per cent of our revenue. We are currently trying to reach out to these SME clusters and for this purpose, we investing towards expanding our retail footprint. We have also rolled out several schemes to specifically meet their requirements,” he added. Talking about regions generating the maximum volume and revenue, he said, “We get the most business from Mumbai region followed by national capital region (NCR) of Delhi. Bangalore is another region from where we registered heavy volumes this year.”