HNA's logistics unit to strengthen industry's global links

HNA Modern Logistics Group, established early last year in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, will help enhance the international operational ability of administration and operation of the logistics industry in China during the process of its engagement with the world cooperation partners, international clients and logistics giants, said Zhang Weiliang, CEO of HNA Modern Logistics.

HNA Modern Logistics has found its own position and needs to take a share of the market, which highly corresponds to building "three economies" of hub economy, portal economy and floating economy proposed by the provincial government, said the CEO.

The Belt and Road Initiative has strengthened the regional economic and trade interaction and increased the foreign investment and construction of China, which greatly expanded the logistics market. The market brings enormous space and opportunities for the domestic logistics enterprises like us, said Zhang.

During the past year, its parent corporation HNA Group completed the stake acquisition of 82.5 percent of the Hahn Airport, Frankfurt. The ceremony was held on Sept 12, 2017. At the ceremony, HNA not only signed the transaction documents, but also the framework cooperation agreement with Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, which will continue to answer the call of the Belt and Road Initiative and strengthen airport logistics cooperation.

Hahn Airport, 125 kilometers from Frankfurt, is one of the major cargo airports in Germany. The signing of the project will provide an important site for HNA Modern Logistics to build an intelligent logistics network in Germany as well as in Europe.

In another move, HNA Modern Logistics also opened three intercontinental all-cargo lines of "Xi'an-Amsterdam", "Xi'an-Anchorage-Chicago" and "Xi'an-Hahn". A total of 99 flights have been carried out with a total transport volume of 9,097 tons, ranking the first place in the international cargo volume in Xi'an. Among them, local cargo transport volume in Xi'an was 2,370 tons, accounting for 26.1 percent of the total, making the city a big air hub linking Europe and the America.

HNA Modern Logistics focuses on building a global supply chain for high-value industries of warehousing investment, airport management, air cargo, logistics, financial services and intelligence logistics. It aims to develop an end-to-end digital platform across the transportation and logistics ecosystem.

At the forefront of the digitization of logistics, HNA Modern Logistics facilitates the upgrading of enterprises' supply chain and refers to the optimization of single-chain logistics to the eco-network, including on-site systematic support to large data and the cloud platform.

HNA Modern Logistics pays high attention to innovation. It proposed the concept of modern logistics 4.0 at the beginning of its operation. Its subsidiary Cloud Intelligent Logistics is a digital driver and digital transformation major carrier of its Logistics 4.0 strategy.

By establishing its Haipingxian platform, it helped HNA Group to provide enhanced digital operation and high-value digital application service to its clients, making the integrated optimization and sharing of the strong logistics infrastructure resources of HNA Group.

The platform has integrated the "air network", "ground network" and "digital network" to make a digital network of its business, logistics, information and capital, making it the overall supply chain service provider of HNA Modern Logistics. The platform has many business sectors including air cargo transportation, supply chain cloud, supply chain finance, intelligent port and intelligent transport.

According to the CEO, HNA Modern Logistics features modern logistics 4.0, which adds information elements in the logistics 3.0. He said that logistics 1.0 refers to the traditional cargo transport; logistics 2.0 is the warehouse service based on the traditional cargo transport while logistics 3.0 adds financial service on the basis of logistics 1.0 and 2.0. The logistics 4.0 enables the company to provide the clients overall high-efficient supply chain package solutions.

The logistics 4.0 requires several key components such as intelligent cargo station, intelligent port including airport, intelligent warehouse, intelligent commercial supermarket, making a perfect combination of different business type that is able to provide the most modern service to the clients, he said.