Delhi-headquartered logistics major Safexpress has set up its largest logistics park in Karnataka at Bengaluru. The park, set up with an investment of around Rs 100 crores, is the second largest for Safexpress in India after its facility at Manesar near Delhi.

The park is spread across an area of 1.25 million square feet and can simultaneously enable loading and unloading of over 260 vehicles. This logistics park is expected to help in the development of different industries in Karnataka. In order to enable all weather loading and unloading of goods, the park has a 16-feet wide cantilever shed.

The company is planning to create seven more logistic parks with an investment of around Rs 350 crores at places such as Jaipur, Ludhiana, Siliguri, Chennai, Pune and Mangalore.

Rubal Jain, Managing Director, Safexpress, explained that the GST in the logistics space has really streamlined the logistics industry and in the future this industry can see much more consolidation. “Post GST, we are helping companies in enhancing their business growth and most of them are now choosing to outsource their supply chain and logistics needs to us while keeping their own warehousing and hub infrastructure to minimal levels.”

Jain further observed that the logistics space in India that is largely unorganised is expected to see more consolidation. “When we started our company almost two decades ago, the organised logistics market was almost nil. Today organised logistics forms around 2-3 percent of the overall logistics market in the country. The market then was dominated by largely unorganised players who usually use to have 5-6 trucks in their company. There was also no uniformity in the types of trucks that were there in the market and every truck looked different. So India has progressed a lot from then. One of the major logistic reforms by the government will aim at uniformity in truck sizes,”said Jain.

He further said that Indian market presented complex challenges for logistic players as Indian highways are prone to flooding and sometimes there are festivals that affecs truck movement. He pointed out that that truckers' strikes also affected the business in a big way and upset schedules.

Interestingly, Safexpress that began its operations in 1997 has a total warehousing area of over 14 million square feet, and provides supply chain and logistics services to more than 5,000 corporate clients that include Tata Motors, Glenmark, Bosch, Volvo etc. Broadly the firm provides logistics services for eight different business verticals including apparel and lifestyle, healthcare, hi-tech, publishing, automotive, engineering and electrical hardware, FMCG and consumer electronics and institutional. Safexpress also has over 6,000 GPS-enabled vehicles and has a distribution network spanning over 620 destinations in the country. At present the company is delivering goods to all the 22,125 pin codes of India.