Pony Express plans to organize a logistics hub in Novosibirsk in the 3rd quarter of 2015. This was reported to RBC.Novosibirsk by the head of the corporate communications service Svetlana Ponkratova.
"The Novosibirsk project is currently under development. After its approval, in the first quarter of 2015, we will be able to talk about the volume of warehouse space and the amount of investment in the facility," Sergei Sergushev, director of the regional development department at Pony Express, told RBC.Novosibirsk. According to him, the hub will be located near major highways, and negotiations with potential contractors are currently underway.
"The need to organize a logistics hub in Novosibirsk is due to the fact that the regional market is experiencing an acute shortage of offers of full-cycle logistics services," says Sergey Sergushev. "We already have requests from a number of our large national and international clients to organize full logistics outsourcing services in Novosibirsk. In addition, the hub will be used as a base for ensuring prompt delivery of goods from Novosibirsk to other regions of the country." Sergushev reports that the coverage area of the future Novosibirsk hub will include Kemerovo, Barnaul, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk, Kurgan, Omsk, as well as adjacent territories.
The company hopes to double its market share in the Novosibirsk region by 2019 as a result of business development and the introduction of new services.
"The Novosibirsk express delivery services market is quite competitive," says Vyacheslav Kuznetsov, director of the DHL Express branch in Novosibirsk. "The 'big four' global operators (TNT Express, DHL, UPS and FedEx — RBC note) and many local players operate there. In total, there are about 70 companies. Most of them focus on the domestic Russian market or transportation between the CIS countries. There are also express carriers specializing in servicing Russian online stores."
At the same time, according to him, local companies offering express international delivery services carry out transportation through the networks of large international operators, and international cargo transportation in the region is quite in demand in the corporate client segment.
"In the current economic conditions, competition in the local market will grow. The corporate sector will be even more attentive to the choice of contractors and will consider express delivery as one of the important business processes that allows reducing other expenses. For example, on the maintenance of warehouses," Kuznetsov is sure.
Co-owner of the courier company SDEK Vyacheslav Piksaev believes that, given the economic stagnation, opening large logistics centers today is not advisable. "There are several major players in the express delivery market. In particular, Pony Express is strong in Moscow and has a weaker position in Siberia. They are making plans to expand into the cross-border trade sphere and, among other things, are laying claim to a share of Chinese parcel traffic, but no one knows them there yet," says Vyacheslav Piksaev.
Let us recall that in early December, the courier service Pony Express announced a change in its operating strategy and plans to become a universal logistics operator. In addition to express delivery and visa services, the company intends to develop warehouse storage, processing, inventory management, routing and forwarding services. During 2015, Pony Express plans to open five logistics hubs in St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Kazan, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk to decentralize deliveries. In the next five years, the company intends to invest about 1 billion rubles in the implementation of the new business development strategy.
English 
Russian