The Russian freight forwarder FESCO has launched a new service connecting Chinese cities to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. FESCO was already active in the region, but is stepping up its competition with local companies on the booming trade route.
The new service, dubbed FESCO Caravan Shuttle, hopes to capture a wide range of containerised freight from China and transport them to Kazakh and Uzbek cities through the Dostyk and Altynkol border crossings. This includes consumer products, industrial items, equipment, spare parts and other types of freight.
FESCO has already started operating the service. It transported a first batch of light industrial products from Xi’an, a key hub for westbound Chinese freight flows, to the Uzbek capital city Tashkent.
Consistent future expansion
“The launch of the FESCO Caravan Shuttle is a part of the Group’s business development strategy in Central Asia. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are a part of the most promising logistics market of the region today. FESCO is already represented by its own offices in these countries, and also has a wide network of representations in China”, explained executive director of FESCO Integrated Transport, Aleksey Kravchenko.
“This allows us to offer customers complex and predictable logistical solutions from the main industrial and economic centres of China. In the future, we plan to consistently broaden the geography of transportation and the service offerings in the region”, Kravchenko added.
In June, FESCO opened a new office in the Chinese city Chengdu to boost the company’s overland volumes bound for Russia, Belarus and Central Asia. FESCO explained that the opening of its new office would allow it to control all stages of the logistical chain in China.