The Business Year

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Global firms are taking the logistics expertise they honed over many years in their domestic markets and around the world and implementing it with impressive results in Portugal.

Olivier Establet

CEO, DPD Chronopost

DPD Group was one of the first to invest in Portugal. In 1997, we made an investment in Jet Services, a family-owned French company with 20 subsidiaries around the world. This was the beginning of the international strategy of the La Poste group outside France. Around 20 years ago, the group realized postal activity would fall and started diversifying into both parcels and banking activities. It later founded the Postal Bank (La Banque Postale), a French business, in addition to a holding company called GeoPost for the parcel business. The first acquisition of GeoPost in the La Poste group was Jet Services, and Portugal was one of the 20 subsidiaries. Portuguese operations started in 1987 before being bought by La Poste in 1997. Back then, La Poste was already an international player competing with the Portuguese Post. We grew organically by being the first company to offer next-morning deliveries and full domestic parcel tracking. Similarly, we were the first to launch cash-on-delivery service. At present, we have 600 parcel shops across Portugal, making us the number-one postal company by a fair margin. Parallel to this strategy of innovation and organic growth, we made some acquisitions in Portugal. One of our biggest achievements in the past five years was acquiring SEUR, the number-one Spanish company. Similarly, we acquired two more companies in Portugal. Including these, the DPD Group ranks first in Portugal with around EUR70 million revenue, 18 million parcels per year, and more than 1,000 employees.

Miguel Mesquita

CEO Portugal, Bolloré

The company was founded in Portugal in 1982. In 2016, it was rebranded as Bolloré Logistics to have a better connection to the Bolloré group. The latter was established in 1822 and is today ranked among the top 500 companies worldwide. Divided into three fields of activity, transport logistics, medial, and electricity storage solutions, it generates more than EUR18 billion in turnover and is present in 130 countries with 82,000 employees worldwide. In Portugal, the company’s primary activity is in transport and logistics and managed from its three offices in Lisbon and Porto with more than 100 full-time employees and generating more than EUR24 million in turnover. The company’s Portugal’s portfolio includes air, sea, road, and logistics services. Currently, the company has more than 2,300 active customers, 82% of which are of Portuguese origin. Our main markets are Angola, São Tomé, Timor, and the US, especially when it comes to our main sectors of activity—food and beverage, aerospace, healthcare, special projects, and defense—which together represent more than 80% of the company’s turnover. We do not, as a rule, receive any governmental support, thought we frequently engage in public tenders, especially to support the Portuguese military in their logistic operations overseas. In order to boost transport and logistics activity in Portugal, the country needs to take better strategic advantage of its location, territorial waters, and manpower. Due to its historical connection to the sea and adaptability of its people, Portugal should be the first and last point of entry of Europe.

Jorge Possollo

General Manager, Jorge Possollo

The company started in 1992, and in the first 10 years, we relied heavily on outsourcing intermediary services to third parties. We subsequently started to develop our own skills in the automotive and logistics industries and create value ourselves for customers. We started mostly in the automotive industry here, namely finished vehicle logistics and spare parts for the PSA brand. We then expanded to other areas during our second decade here such as air, sea, and road, and continued in automotive logistics development with car parking compounds. We developed new special services such as the GEFCO Special, a tailor made ultra-urgent service designed to tackle customers’ most urgent needs. I am pleased with that development over the last two years. We now have our own car-parking compound and have invested in infrastructure that will allow us to develop further coverage across the country. The GEFCO Group had a fairly successful performance over the last few years, and GEFCO Portugal was no exception. Our clients benefit from the extensive experience that RZD, which owns 75% of our company, has in the train transport industry, which is a plus for GEFCO because we did not have such expertise before. It is also exciting for our employees to know that companies as important as RZD in Russia would like a share of GEFCO. RZD’s acquisition was in 2012, and the company has improved its results and is worth more since then.

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