Haulio wants to be go-to digital platform for container haulage
Tessa Oh
DIGITAL logistics firm Haulio has been going places since it became a finalist of the Emerging Enterprise Awards in 2019, just 2 years after it was founded. The company, which connects first-mile container haulers with businesses and shippers, transacts more than 1.8 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) annually. This year, it raised US$7 million in a Series A round led by Temasek’s Heliconia Capital, with the funds to be used for enhancing service quality, acquiring talent, and expanding deeper into the region.
The Business Times sat down with founders Alvin Ea and Sebastian Shen to look back on Haulio’s achievements, and to find out more about their future plans.
Q: What has changed for Haulio since 2019? How has the company grown since?
Alvin: The biggest change for us was Covid-19. But we are a fast growing company, so we were already going to expand regionally. So despite Covid-19, we launched successfully in Thailand in 2021. We also successfully raised Series A (funding) at the end of last year, led by Heliconia Capital. It demonstrates global interest in our company and our core mission of transforming this very archaic, old-school, traditional logistics industry powered by technology.
Our revenue numbers went up significantly by 114 per cent in 2021 despite Covid... but with Thailand coming up (and our plans) beyond, I think 2022 will be one of our biggest years.
Q: To what would you attribute the good performance in 2021?
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Alvin: The good thing that came out of (Covid) was that digitalisation became a need, rather than a “good-to-have”. That’s why this year, we are actually on course to grow more than 6 times in Thailand — our first overseas market. Also, we are already preparing ourselves for newer markets, like the rest of South-east Asia, where we plan to be in the next 18 months — the likes of Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Q: Could you elaborate on your plans to expand into the region?
Alvin: The harsh reality is that this industry is traditional and it can be quite complicated. (The challenges) could also be geopolitical... So what we had to do was to really sense the ground, and first and foremost to understand the workflow and process of how container haulage is like (in those countries).
We are thankful to have strategic investors, such as PSA as well as ComfortDelGro, to leverage on their networks to be able to help us to have a better sense on the ground. That’s how we are able to expand into these regions with the right strategic local partners.
Q: Haulio celebrates its 5th anniversary this year. Looking ahead, where do you see the company headed and what do you hope to achieve by your 10th year?
Alvin: What we hope to achieve in the next 5 years is to be at least one step closer to our vision. We believe that the future of container logistics will definitely digital... but the part about electric education and sustainability — that’s part of what we are trying to do by reducing the carbon footprint of these trucking operators by better matching them with containers.
We want to be the best-in-class representation in Singapore as a company that can influence and set the standards, and a new bar, across South-east Asia.
Sebastian: I see ourselves as the platform for container haulage. (Now that) the supply chain is beginning to realise that (digitalisation) is a must-have... there are a lot of independent developments that are actually happening.
Ten years later, what I envision is that Haulio becomes the platform to ensure interoperability throughout the entire container haulage space, where (with) all these transactions – both offline and online – we can either help to implement all these things, or we can assist the operators on the ground to be able to use a single window to navigate all these applications that are coming up.
This article is part of a series on former finalists of the Emerging Enterprise Awards. This year’s EE winners will be announced on Nov 22.
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