News / UWL broadens its China footprint, opening four new locations

As firms shift procurement from China, US 3PL UWL is ramping up its footprint there, opening four locations to add to its branch in Shanghai, opened last Autumn.

VP of 3PL service Martin Karczewski acknowledged the migration of sourcing from China to other locations in Asia, but said the supply chains and infrastructure China had developed over the past three decades would be difficult to replace, which meant companies wouyld continue to rely on China for sourcing, just to a lesser extent.

Customer interest in improved services out of China remained high, he added.

UWL’s stronger presence in China aims to accomplish two things: to improve visibility; and to give it and its clients better control over shipments.

The 3PL’s president, Duncan Wright, explained: “This expansion is part of our strategy to be physically closer to our customers’ factories and our ocean network and carrier partners. The better we can collaborate on solutions, and have more direct control of origin services, the better we can support our customers.”

Mr Karczewski pointed to a disconnect between events in China and information available to importers and logistics providers outside the country, which impeded their ability to intervene and re-route a shipment or take corrective measures. Having its own staff on the ground radically improved UWL’s ability to get an accurate understanding of a situation and take action, he said.

“We strategically selected the four most active regions catering for manufacturing density and major export ports for the majority of US imports,” Mr Karczewskli explained. “[The new locations] Yantian in the south, Ningbo in central China and Qingdao and Dalian in the north have consistently ranked in the top regions for cargo flow, so it makes sense to our customers, their shippers and the available pool of logistics talent for UWL to expand in those areas.”

And choosing major container gateways reflects the company’s primary focus on ocean traffic.

“If we were to go down the airfreight route, we would have gone for Hong Kong and Shanghai first,” Mr Karczewski said. “We have started moving airfreight in Shanghai and will continue to evolve that.”

UWL’s Sun Chief Express service out of Vietnam launched in April last year in partnership with Swire Shipping offering a 25-day transit to Seattle. Management has no intention of replicating this concept for its intermodal service to the US, though.

Whereas the Vietnam-US market was underserved, there is ample capacity available in the China-US sector that would make it impossible to compete with the Sun Chief concept, Mr Karczewski noted. UWL’s Vietnam-US offering is the only service with smaller vessels and shorter transits launched over the past couple of years that is still in operation, he added.

According to him, business has gone well in China since the opening of UWL’s Shanghai office. The company had planned to make its move into China around 2019 or 2020, but these plans were delayed by Covid and the subsequent disruptions in China.

For now, UWL’s focus in China is on origin ocean traffic. Down the road, Mr Karczewski sees scope to expand into regional supply chains of Chinese manufacturers, many of which have established offshoots in nearby countries.

He said the Sun Chief service and its feeders covered Vietnam, South Korea Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia and added: “We can near-source for folks, we can do consolidation, we’ve got systems and technology that can accomplish that. The natural evolution is as you mature in these markets, it doesn’t have to be one-dimensional, it doesn’t just have to be Shanghai to L.A. 5,000 times a year.

“You can start doing some really creative things for customers and then connecting those via technology, sort of bringing those supply chains to life.”