News / Trend for vertical integration may not be right for multimodal transport

© Kanison Charicha

Carriers and shippers with ambitions to be integrators looking to “take the forwarder out” of supply chains, may not be the right solution for intermodal transport, delegates at last week’s World Cargo Summit in Bruges heard. 

Philippe Beaujean, international business development advisor at the port of Antwerp-Bruges, identified what he called “a big problem” in multimodal shipping – the lack of integration between stakeholders across different modes. 

“What we see now is a lot of vertical integration within the supply chain, and ...