That special difference
Nova Traffic offers its customers ‘the fine art of logistics – made in Switzerland’. Daniel Stein, the managing director of the company founded in 1982, invited ITJ editor Andreas Haug to its headquarters in Kloten, near Zurich airport, to explain what this means.
You travel a lot, don’t you Mr Stein – all the more pleasant for us to meet here, in our home country.
We try and make the best of the beginning of the year, and lay the foundations for business in the quarters ahead. We engage in intense customer care and project support activities in this time.
Our team members have already completed successful business trips to Asia three times this year, as well as travelling to Spain and the United Kingdom. There are important e-commerce markets there, as well as in the Netherlands. This is one of the regions that’s becoming ever-more important, overall, for our various logistics activities.
How does this manifest itself in numbers?
In our warehouse in Embrach (Switzerland) we manage no less than 50,000 picks a day. Much of it is automated, but the efforts of our 70 employees are invaluable.
The human element of your business is central, it seems to me.
That’s true. Although we’ve grown relatively strongly, we still consider ourselves to be an SME, you see. We run offices worldwide, and are represented by partners or colleagues in certain territories. We know them all personally, by the way. These networks are important, because if a problem arises, you can use them to find unconventional solutions that benefit your customers.
You’ve been in business for a pretty long time now – how have things developed?
I’ve been working in forwarding for more than 35 years now, and in my opinion the belief in the omnipotence of technology started to spread about 15 years ago. I’ve never followed the trend of communicating exclusively through the internet, using video conferencing or the like. Now I’m happy to see that there’s been a reversal in this business behaviour trend over the past few years. Our customers appreciate this – we’ve always maintained close contacts with them.
What business fields does Nova Traffic cover and how have they developed?
Airfreight forwarding was our first operational mainstay. Sea freight activities followed shortly thereafter; warehousing logistics then joined our portfolio later. They all developed more or less equally. I joined the company as part of a succession plan in 2005 and became the owner two years later. Since then we’ve grown continuously – on a larger scale every two years.
The milestones we attained were always linked directly to specific clients. There was a strategic cooperation deal with Swiss Post, entry into the e-commerce segment, expansion of our warehousing activities in collaboration with a customer in the optics sector, etc.
In the freight sector we entered the aviation industry supply chain through a global operations contract with SR Technics. The latest breakthrough came more than a year ago in the life sciences sector. Speed plays a key role in this contract, which centres on the certified handling of radioactive materials.
Our developments are all-encompassing. In 2007 we had 16 employees; a year later this figure had grown to 25, and today it’s already reached 70, as I mentioned above.
What proportion of business does each of Nova Traffic’s units contribute?
There’s been plenty of change in the mix over the years. For a long time, our original freight forwarding department accounted for around 90% of our revenues. Five years ago, our logistics division predominated slightly; it includes warehouse management as well as distribution services. Meanwhile, both departments contribute about the same. This healthy development makes us confident for the future.
What hardware do you manage?
There’s our headquarters; then there’s the above-mentioned warehouse in Embrach, where we manage around 25,000 sqm of storage space. By the way, we offer IT firms around-the-clock services there. Then there’s our warehouse in Geneva, which serves French-speaking Switzerland, and our rented offices at Basel airport, as well as in Geneva, and in Chiasso, in the south on the Swiss border with Italy.
How did business go in 2018? What are your expectations for 2019?
An above-average growth rate made 2018 the best year in our history. That cost a lot of energy, but some aspects gelled effortlessly. We’re really proud of that. Now we want to take this momentum with us into the future. The first quarter already went quite well.
We manage logistics activities in many fields that are key to Switzerland as a production and manufacturing centre, including mechanical engineering as well as precision mechanics. We expect more organic growth in the pharmaceuticals segment in the near future; we’ve acquired special know-how there, as well as in the telecommunications sector. We naturally support our overall development with strong investment activities, also at the personnel level.