Technology, NLP, Hiring Trends – Logistics Sector Upliftment In Festive Season

After two years of the world being restricted due to the pandemic, when e-commerce sales remained subdued, finally we are at the cusp of a full-fledged Indian festive season. There is a lot of optimism around the demand surge in the upcoming festive season. The Indian Logistics industry is gearing up to rise to the occasion with measures such as getting warehouses ready, focussing more on automation, and enabling digitisation.

A media survey revealed that 68 per cent of Indians are excited about the upcoming festive season sales, which is an increase from the 59 per cent recorded last year. Additionally, two in three shoppers intend to spend as much or more this festive season compared to the last festive season. Besides, nearly 40 per cent of consumers are planning to start shopping in mid-October or earlier. As per another media report, India’s e-commerce market, presently having approximately 165 million online shoppers, is predicted to have 350 million online shoppers by 2025. The report also stated that the e-commerce sector continues to be one of the top three funded sectors with the highest number of unicorns. Predictions also show that India’s e-commerce market would provide a market opportunity of 400 billion dollars by 2030.

The logistics industry is one of the most critical e-commerce enablers in India. Reports suggest that in the fiscal year of 2020, the warehousing market was valued at Rs. 105,000 crores, which is predicted to reach Rs 224.4K crores in 2026. Even though the space requirement stood at 265 million square feet in FY21, predictions suggest it reaching 483 million square feet in 2026.

Coupled with the recently launched National Logistics Policy, the industry is likely to record a significant growth. The Government has been consistent in its efforts to enable an efficient ecosystem to boost the efficiency of the Indian logistics sector, both domestically and internationally. The NLP focuses on leveraging technology to achieve the vision of bringing down India's logistics costs.

Sahil Barua, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Delhivery stated, “We firmly believe that this will have a direct impact on improving the overall competitiveness of the Indian industry globally, thereby fuelling the journey towards becoming a USD 5 trillion economy. Delhivery has always been a tech-focused company, and we stand committed to realizing this grand vision. We will double down on our investments in building cutting-edge infrastructure, technology, data science, and engineering capabilities to lead the development of the logistics industry in India."

Yash Jain, Co-founder, Nimbus Post stated to BW, “We’re aggressively hiring across all teams including Tech, marketing, HR, operations, sales, and others to ensure smooth business operations. The festive season drives the e-commerce and logistics business to a higher level. We’ve seen a 5x growth during this year’s festive season and are looking to grow by 10x. We are planning to fulfil the high-volume shipment needs of e-commerce merchants by introducing warehouses across the world, starting with the United Kingdom and the United States.”

Digitalisation is helping the logistics industry to improvise its business structure. The first trend is the use of integration technology. Logistic companies are now learning and embracing modern integration technology. It helps with quicker onboarding of customers, trading partners, and suppliers, as well as provides end-to-end visibility so logistics companies can conduct business quicker. Automation at every level is another major trend to look out for. Be it distribution centres or user experience, automation makes most of the processes easier. For example, usual warehouse automation includes the digitisation of manual processes, operators using barcodes to scan and LED lights indicating the number of items for pick-up and their destination, and autonomous mobile robots working inside warehouses. Third, as e-commerce continues to expand, many companies are also seeing quite a bit of potential in integrated 3PL services. “A 3PL provider offers services including warehousing and inventory management, transportation management and brokerage, consolidation, distribution and fulfilment, air and ocean freight forwarding, customs clearance, etc. 3PL service providers take care of comprehensive freight process management from beginning to end,” Jain emphasised.

Arshdeep Singh Mundi, Managing Director, Jujhar Logistics told BW about how the firm intends to rapidly expand its team and create job opportunities for people. “We plan to hire approximately 1000 new employees across offices this fiscal year. Hiring is a continuous process, and we strictly adhere to our hiring policies.”

“Year-on-year we replace 20 per cent to 25 per cent of our vehicles to ensure that there is no compromise on safety and productivity. After seeing tremendous growth this year, we are looking at a CAPEX of around Rs. 180 million in the next financial year which will be spent on containers and trucks & buses. Recently we invested Rs 174 million and bought 70 numbers of new trucks from Tata Motors for fulfilling the growing demand of transport requirements of the logistics industry in the region and enhancing our delivery capabilities,” Mundi added.

Arham Partap Jain, Founder & Chief Trucking Officer, Trucknetic, in a conversation with BW stated, “The hiring usually ramps for logistics firms during this season to meet the manpower needs due to the burdened supply chain. The hiring is usually contract-based on the delivery side. The workforce increases by almost 25 per cent at the peak of the season.”

Additionally, this sector has also seen increased importance for monitoring vehicle health in recent times due to the surge in road accidents. “Advanced driver monitoring and analytics systems are being fitted in commercial vehicles to cater to varied duty cycles and special applications. Trucknetic is currently providing solutions for the trucking needs of retail tech, pharma tech, and agri tech and would be expanding to other verticals soon,” he added.

Logistics start-ups and legacy players are all banking on the high-order inflow during this season. The Transport Corporation of India (TCI) predicts that its capacity, resource allocation and utilisation to go up by 20-25 per cent during this festive season. Evolving technology, NLP, and increasing hiring trends in this sector are likely to emerge as key contributors to an economic boost this festive season.