Technology As The Answer For Brand Growth And Evolution
Before 2010, there was nobody who had been to a good engineering college or done an MBA that would say that they wanted to join the logistics industry in India. This was because there was very little technology and internet penetration back then. Things began changing after India started bringing in technological developments, which opened up the scope of opportunities for the young talent pool here.
One such firm is Delhivery, which made technology its major focus, which in turn changed the entire business for them. Speaking at a recently concluded summit, Suraj Saharan, Co-Founder, Delhivery said, “We call ourselves as the company that is trying to build the operating system for commerce in India. And technology plays an integral role in this.”
Saharan explained, “We are at about 200 million dollars a year, compare that with about 1500 billion dollars in the US. That as a percent of the GDP is about 7-10 per cent. However, the combined shares of the top ten big Indian players are only at 1.5 per cent as compared to much higher percentages in the west. We already know that as an economy grows, larger players tend to enter the market, since Logistics is a business where scale matters. The larger you are, the cost of transportation goes down dramatically.”
He said that each of the services that Delhivery offers has a very powerful self-reinforcing capability. “What happens is that we start off by establishing high quality infrastructure, and reach. That provides a higher level of customer experience which then leads to more volume. When that volume comes in, you get the scale. And that, then finally, reduces the cost. This keeps rotating and the brand keeps getting larger. The same thing happens on the tech and the data side. One starts off by building intelligence from order data, then begins the process of productising these offerings. Then, there comes a need to keep extending your product,” added Saharan.
“We started off with e-commerce clients doing only intra-city deliveries for small parcels. Over the years, we grew and started providing the same services to SMEs, went national, and started doing more. As we grew, we kept adding more services, more clients, more types of value-added services, etc. The company was totally infra-based, to begin with, and then grew up to be intelligence-based, wherein we used the data we had for the company’s growth,” said Saharan while emphasising on the importance that technology played in his firm.
Talking about the company’s growth, he described that there were four stages in it. “The first was FY12-13. We set off by establishing our first few warehouses, implementing our own tech solutions, etc. The next phase was about scaling it up after having established our business. The third generation was about integration, where we started working with other parties. And finally, the fourth generation was this platform. Now, we are extending our tech-only solutions to other logistics companies as well as launched full truckload services and other supply chain services,” Saharan added.
Saharan mentioned how, basically, technology is the answer to everything. He said that it was one of the most important aspects which took the brand from being restricted to just a small place to now becoming a global entity. He added that is important for brands to become tech-centered, going further, to evolve and grow.
