With a real shift to rail
transport in the past year,
any road transporter wanting
to compete should have been
busy adjusting his strategy,
according to Sue Moodley,
founder and MD of the
Durban-based short- and
long-haul carrier, Transport.
com.
“Road didn’t perform last
year,” she told FTW, “but
rail did.”
Figures supporting this
are contained in the 2012
SA freight transport report
from Business Monitor
International (BMI), which
estimated rail freight
growth in 2012 at 8.4%.
But total trade growth for
2012 it forecast at 1.3%, a
major drop down from the
estimated 7.8% expansion in
2011. And, as the bulk of SA
trade (in value, not weight) is
in containerised transport –
the forte for road hauliers – it
must be assumed that road
was faced with a severely
diminished market demand.
“Rail was also very
efficient in terms of
being timeous, and this
has impacted on road
transporters,” Moodley said.
“At the same time, a number
of clients opted for rail
because of the attractively
low rates.”
Road transport, therefore,
she saw as having battled
last year. “A primary driving
force was the recession
which started in 2009,” she
added, “and from which
road has just never been
able to recover. And that’s a
widespread opinion across
a spectrum of road hauliers,
all of whom said they
had suffered from clients
choosing rail because of
those factors of timeousness
and cost.”
Container hauliers were
also blighted by a major
swing to rail early last year
of export scrap copper and
other similar high-value
products – with clients
opting for rail to avoid the
high theft of such products
from road vehicles. This
was then followed by snow
on the N3 in mid-year, and
a major truckers’ strike in
September/October.
“All these following
one after the other added
to ongoing congestion at
Durban’s container terminals
throughout the year. This
slammed into the container
cartage market, and road
transport failed to pick up
from this,” said Moodley.
There are two things that
truckers can do in such
a situation, according to
Moodley – sit back and bite
the bullet or go out and fight
for business.
“We have opted for the
latter course,” she said, “and
from January to December
we had to keep changing
our strategy to match
what was happening in the
marketplace.”
A significant example
of this change was in
Transport.com switching
its focus from transporting
containers. “When I went
to my container clients,
they told me that containers
were still coming in, but
that they’d changed to rail
because of the lower cost and
the fact that timelines were
keener as rail was avoiding
all the month-on-month
problems that had hit road
transporters.”
The option for Transport.
com was two-fold.
“Because we are
diversified – having both the
appropriate transport rigs
and the equipment to handle
it – we moved our focus from
containers to breakbulk,”
said Moodley. “We also opened a
container depot early last year, and
when container cartage went bottomup,
we started concentrating more on
reefer boxes stored in the depot as an
alternative income option.”
The indicators for such an analysis
are contained in a transporter’s
records of vehicle usage, sales and
income, and from customs and
Transnet Port Terminals (TPT)
records of cargo movement at the
port, according to Moodley.
“You must carefully analyse these
figures and trends on a month-onmonth
basis,” she said. “And, if you
don’t adjust your strategy to match
these trends, you’ll surely lose out.”
INSERT
‘Container hauliers
were blighted by a
major swing to rail of
export scrap copper
early last year.’
CAPTION
Sue Moodley ... container depot opened last year.
