At Rhenus Everything Old Is New Again

     In Europe and elsewhere, air cargo transportation executives versed in marketing and sales have long safeguarded corporate identity.
     A “we can do it” attitude has put air cargo handling costs on some murky expense line while airlines and forwarders proudly extol the virtue of their own cargo facilities.
     Maybe it was 911 or the desire to concentrate on “core business” that has slowly brought change to cargo as part of the “new normal” world all around us.
     Whatever the background, right now, finance managers seem to be getting a hearing when they speak of the real cost of handling air cargo.
     As a result of this increasing awareness amongst sales and marketing types and their money people that handling is just too damn expensive, a new breed of handling companies has come into existence.
     At Cargo City South in Frankfurt yesterday a big Oktoberfest party celebrated the launch of the Rhenus Air Handling Facility inside a 15,000 square meter mega terminal.
     Some 15 years ago, long before anybody in these parts had thought much about third party handling, Stefan Bazant was in the airfreight business as a trucker organizing cargo feeder runs.
     Along the way he took note that airlines and forwarders were having problems manning their warehouses at night and on weekends.
     Resourceful, Stefan saw an opportunity.
     He promptly went out and rented a small warehouse, hired a crew, and went about the business of offering handling services to the air cargo community here, calling the company “AF Forwarding and Logistics”.
     What looked like a madhouse on a weekend night was a cool, well-organized job; receiving cargo, checking weight and measurements, palletizing with utmost precision and having the units ready for carriage as well as finally delivered to the airlines sharp on time.
     But Stefan didn’t just talk to airlines, he also went to the forwarders for their business.
     Pretty soon AF Logistics had to rent additional space, hire and train more people.
     Stefan Bazant was approached by the Luxembourg company Thiel Logistik a few years ago.
     Thiel Logistik made him an offer he couldn’t refuse for AF.
     But for his love of the game, Stefan remained as AF managing director.
     Earlier this year in June, Rhenus Air Handling bought AF from Thiel Logistik.
     Rhenus by the way is is an old-line German company with roots in Mannheim and great prominence along the Rhine, serving      100 years in the transportation business of Europe on road rail, river barges, warehousing and now international ocean and air.
     Rhenus air cargo took flight in its logistics portfolio when it acquired Cargologic from Swissair in 2002.
     Rhenus recruited Peter Somaglia who had served at Swissair to become Managing Director of Cargologic in Switzerland, and the new Rhenus Air Handling Ltd.
     Today Frankfurt is Rhenus’ first major investment outside Switzerland.
     Peter Somaglia notes:
     “Our approach to the market is clearly different to that of other major players in this business.
     “We do not want to become global—we will continuously add European airfreight hubs to our Swiss-German basic network.
     “Next after FRA might be Benelux, Italy and Scandinavia.
     “We will interconnect this network with our state of the art IT system and we shall not concentrate our sales and marketing efforts on airlines only, but also on the forwarding sector as well.
     “We are here not to conquer Europe, but to establish Swiss quality service for all concerned along the chain at reasonable fees to serve the airfreight hubs in Europe.
     “Rhenus is coming home with a specific and successful business segment, with AF-Logistics expertise and people and customer portfolio as a rock solid base.
     “We think the fit is good all around.
     “In our human resources management we look for the same targets.
     “In Juerg Habisreutinger and Marco Gredig we have experts who perfectly match with Stefan and his operations manager, Gerhard.
     While the music played and the Oktoberfest continued, shipments were moving about in counterpoint to a brand new player with room to grow.
     For Rhenus, everything old is new again.
(Günter Mosler)