KUALA LUMPUR: FedEx Express Malaysia has experienced increased volume demand during the Covid-19 pandemic, driven by the increase of e-commerce purchases among Malaysians, managing director SC Chong said.
Chong said the already booming online purchases trend had gained a renewed momentum with more adoption among customers across the region.
According to the GlobalData's E-Commerce Analytics, Malaysia's e-commerce market reported a 24.7 per cent growth in 2020.
"This e-commerce boom presents a great opportunity especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as they are now in a ripe position to migrate to an on-line business model, further grow their business, increase profitability and reach a wider customer base.
"Even fruit sellers, mobile food cart operators, florists and farmers are now able to see the benefits of e-commerce," Chong told the New Straits Times in an interview recently.
According to the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, a total of 489,000 micro, small and medium enterprises had adopted e-commerce at the end of 2020.
Companies using e-commerce for export grew exponentially from 1,800 to 27,000 in the same period.
Chong said FedEX Malaysia had fortunately managed the pandemic quite well thus far.
"Safety has been our top most priority for our employees and for our customers. We started the preparation and activated a Business Continuity Plan since late 2019. Learning from the experience of our colleagues in China, we set up clear Standard Operating Procedures and conducted numerous workshops to prepare and educate our employees for the pandemic."
He added that as an essential service provider, FedEx had been serving the nation throughout the lockdowns and never stopped operating.
"As more consumers are purchasing online during the lockdowns, we have dealt with increased volumes in deliveries. With this dependency on e-commerce, we are confident to lead through technology and boost our capabilities at the intersection of the digital and physical world to position FedEx as a positive market disruptor."
Some of its existing digital solutions remained central to ensuring FedEx Malaysia offered superior customer service, he added.
"Take for example, our collaboration with Microsoft to launch FedEx Surround. This collaboration powers FedEx logistics network with Microsoft's intelligent cloud.
"It allows any business to enhance visibility into its supply chain by leveraging data to provide near-real-time analytics into shipment tracking, which will drive precise logistics and inventory management," he said.
Meanwhile, Chong said diverse sourcing under decentralised supply chains was likely to benefit countries like India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Thailand, and change the pattern of how goods move, requiring trade lane diversification to reduce dependencies on one country or one production location.
He said during the pandemic, commercial flights remain constrained due to lack of cross-border travel. This had created a shortage of air cargo capacity in Malaysia especially for North America, Europe and Intra-Asia destinations.
"At FedEx, we are able to flex our own network and fleet to best serve customers and freight demand through our own global air and the Asia Road Network.
"We have also increased our flight frequency in Asia to cater for the demand of our customers, especially from Asia to North America and Europe. Due to the e-commerce growth, FedEx also added cargo capacity on its routes in the Asia-Pacific region," Chong said.