Ahmed Salah Abdulaal was introduced to logistics at a tender age. It has been the family business for decades. His father was always taking Ahmed as a child to watch how they handled the big orders, which he found really fascinating to see how it all happened. Once, they shipped baby donkeys to Japan by air. That day fired his interest in logistics.
EG: What is the passion behind starting your business?
Ahmed Salah Abdulaal: Starting from this level of passion has always fuelled my thinking outside the box and introduce new services through ‘The Shipping Spot’ to solve existing problems after I had suffering from my share of them.
EG: What is your background?
ASA: I studied business, economics, marketing and technology while I worked temporarily in my father’s company as an operation and managing assistant.
After finishing my MBA, I co-founded a freight forwarding company, where I was a business development manager for ten years.
We really went to places and expanded internationally before I sold my share of the business to realise my dream with ‘The Shipping Spot’ four years ago.
EG: What are the issues you are solving and what is your value proposition?
ASA: Before ‘Shipping Spot’, working with the same tools as everyone else is using and clients encountering the same old problems, stimulated me to think outside the box and use a business model from other industries and apply it to logistics.
Logistics service providers need more business and suffering from the same old sales techniques. While clients (B2B – B2C) waste a lot of time and effort to reach the best price and service. If only they knew how to reach that efficiently.
‘The Shipping Spot’ gives everyone straightforward solutions to their problems through our easy-to-use portal that functions as a neutral marketplace for all logistic services.
Clients can obtain options while preserving their privacy and keeping it hassle free. Service providers can secure more business at a fraction of the cost they already pay.
EG: Tell us more about the process, users and business model.
ASA: We spent a lot of time creating and modifying our process and drew on our expertise and the help of UX/UI designers to reach the simplest process and forms for our users without sacrificing quality.
Our clients can register free of charge. On their dashboard they can create any service request — international shipping, domestic delivery, customs clearance, packaging and warehousing. A request is passed on to our accredited service providers, who submit their quotations for the client to review and select the one that best matches their requirements in terms of price, time, credit facility & rating. Once a quotation is accepted, the service provider can establish a direct connection with the client.
We have clients in telecom, printing, plastics, recycling, food and beverage. Also, we have individuals who ship their personal belongings as well.
For service provider-users we have accredited companies providing all kinds of logistic services.
We are proud to say we have international users and requests. We do not target international markets with more than 10 percent of our resources because our plan is to establish a strong base in our local market first.
Our business model can be seen as essentially a matchmaking model, but we are coming up with more ideas to match other models for the near future.
EG: What are your main challenges?
ASA: Skepticism. Just like any service with a new approach for an old routine problem that people have grown accustomed to, people are get skeptical because it’s an intangible thing that we are introducing to the market.
We have walked a long way on this road but it’s still our number one challenge to date. We have toured locally and internationally with our product, attending conferences and exhibitions and every time we improve our brand and service awareness.
EG: What are your achievements and future plans?
ASA: We won the Bahrain Tech Award 2018 during GITEX Technology Week in Dubai. Our direct network covers 30 countries. We have a vendor agreement with one of largest international networks in the world with more than 190 counties. We started with one service, now we provide five.
We are working on new services and revenue streams that none of the competition has, which will directly increase our numbers within six months of their launch later this year or early next year.
Also, we are negotiating with local and international parties, which will have a huge impact on our market position. One of them will be the first of its kind in logistics and in other fields in the Egyptian market.
EG: Do you think the ecosystem is helping you?
ASA: The Egyptian ecosystem is dynamic lately with new VCs and incubators entering the market every day, but our experience is different.
When we started, we came across two governmental and semi- government entities. TIEC and DETGD were really helpful and supportive. However, the logistics-related entity was disappointing and harmful at different levels. But we met the challenge and moved on.
We also attended several events that were organised as part of the ecosystem, even though some of them were not effective. On the whole we learned a lot from the experience.
Now, we plan to use the ecosystem in our favor as we know our way around as the ecosystem is reaching a new benchmark this year with the largest investments ever made in Egyptian startups.
