Express rose 25% as conventional freight down 7%

Express freight has grown by 25 per cent from 2008 whereas conventional freight fell between 6 to 7 per cent in 2009, said Hamdi Osman, Senior Vice-President, Middle East, Indian Subcontinent and Africa, FedEx, after signing a MoU with Dubai Customs for using the electronic business channel B2G. Osman said that reliance on conventional freight is reducing and importers and exporters are opting for express freight. “In 2009, conventional freight fell by about 6 to 7 per cent whereas express freight has significantly increased by 25 per cent since 2008. A quality change has been witnessed over the past five years in logistics,” he noted adding, “This indicates that there are no more stocks of cargo in the markets and that importers are demanding cargo for immediate supply and manufacturers are having their newly produced cargo ready for export." Osman expected that even more traders would opt for express freight in coming years due to the easy clearance procedures and formalities offered for both governments and the private sectors via systems such as Mirsal. “FedEx which offers express freight services in 32 countries including the USA, Japan, France and England is the first express transportation company to utilise the Mirsal 2 B2G Courier Service with Dubai Customs,” he said. Prior to applying Mirsal, cargo clearance used to take days. Now the system does not take more than a couple of hours. In many cases cargo got cleared even prior to the arrival of the plane and the Government of Dubai and its Customs Department are always eager to implement recent information technologies and applications for the benefit of both the government and the private sectors and by that they set an example for other countries to emulate, said Osman. Ahmed Mahboob Musabih, Executive Director of Client Management Division, who signed the agreement on behalf of Dubai Customs, said that as per the agreement once FedEx inputs cargo information into its internal systems, the data will be automatically transferred to Dubai Customs’ Mirsal 2 system. Musabih said: “We believe that our B2G initiative will provide numerous advantages to the companies using this system including entering information only once in the clients’ internal system which entails reusing them for submitting customs declarations, besides reducing human mistakes, quick clearing of customs declarations, eliminating the need of visiting customs operations counters, reducing the cost of customs declarations and providing a 24|7 accessible service.”