Lots of times we get in situations where management doesn’t ‘get it’. It’s particularly true of sustainability issues in purchasing and supply management.
In my business career, as an IT executive, I found myself in such positions quite a few times. As the CPO here says, maybe it’s time to move on if the opposition is so hard-nosed.
Supply Chain News: CPO at Bayer encourages Procurement Managers to Fight Hard for Sustainability
Its product then: “Optimise, formerly known as SimBunker, claims to enable owners and operators to reduce bunker consumption by determining the optimal speed of each vessel using multiple data points such as market rates, bunker prices, weather and individual vessel performance.”
The goal was to reduce emissions and costs of maritime transport. At the time it had 6 customers and 300 vessels using the product.
Now new funding has been received, and more backers have joined in investing.
This type of firm is just reaching the point when software support is starting to impose a burden on the firm. Most software startups can defer for a while the problem of support, but when the customer base grows enough, the whole cycle of customer support and updates and patches mushrooms exponentially. This places great financial demands on the firm. And it’s not profit-generating. The company benefit is only reputation, which takes a long time to repay the investment. But if reputation is tarnished by poor or unresponsive service, the company may be dealt a blow it cannot recover from, losing customers and revenues. It’s a critical time in a software startup’s lifetime.
The support conundrum is the principal reason for the failure of software startups and generally occurs later in the business arc than support for hardware-oriented products.
It turns out that major shareholders of Freightos are also large logistics companies— FedEx, Qatar Airways, and IAG Cargo. Thre are others, such as Singapore Exchange, who participated in Freightos’s Series C round of financing. There has been a policy of keeping major shareholders hidden.
Is this bad? Not necessarily, but there could be conflicts of interest. Some customers won’t care, but others might if their interests are not being addressed.
Freightos operates an online international freight marketplace [Wikipedia]. It also sells multimodal freight, and booking automation for carriers and freight forwarders. The Wikipedia article does a good job of explaining what they do and what acquisitions they have made. They’re a freight broker and carrier, with a software platform, though they started out as a software company.
Complicated ownership structures are not uncommon in business. Whether they influence how they do business in the small is a different question. At present we don’t hear of any customer issues.
Partners’ business relations should always include checking on whether ownership affects the partner’s way of doing business with you.
Supply Chain and Logistics 