News / Lidl expands its Tailwind brand into overland logistics

Lidl's Tailwind Shipping ship, Wiking. Photo: VesselFinder

German retailer Lidl has expanded its Tailwind brand into overland logistics, setting up a new unit – Tailwind Intermodal.

“As a sister company of Tailwind Shipping Lines, it will organise and coordinate the inland transport of goods arriving at the seaport of Koper, in Slovenia,” said the company.

“Koper is the strategically most important port for Tailwind. Its ships bring goods in on the Panda Express liner service from China. Tailwind Intermodal is responsible for the onward carriage to the back country, as well as the return of empty containers to the port.”

Tailwind commissions partners to transport the goods, with up to five daily train connections to the multimodal cargo centre in Graz, Austria.

“Thanks to its geographical location between the Adriatic and the Baltic States, the cargo centre forms an ideal connection to Eastern Europe,” added the company.

And with the expansion of its operations in Koper and in Styria, Tailwind is “contributing to strengthening the performance of supply chains between China and Europe by combining sea freight and onshore carriage as a neutral service provider ”, the company claimed.

Lidl set up its own ocean freight operation in April 2022 to take greater control of its shipping requirements and to more easily deal with supply chain problems and high container shipping costs.

As the Covid pandemic waned, while other retail chains pulled back from chartering ships themselves, Lidl has doubled-down, with data from Asia-based box analyst Linerlytica now showing Tailwind is the fastest-growing box carrier in the world, up 43% since last July .

The ‘Tailwind’ effect is visible in the throughput at the port of Koper, which handled record numbers of containers last year: just over one million teu, up 5% compared with 2022.