DPD IN RUSSIA PARTICIPATED IN KNIGHT FRANK’S WAREHOUSE CONFERENCE

Nikolay Voinov, the General Director for DPD in Russia, the largest commercial operator on the Russian express-delivery and logistics market, was an expert at Knight Frank’s warehouse conference.

The conference’s program was dedicated to transformations in demand and warehouses. Nikolay Voinov, the General Director of DPD in Russia, was invited to participate in a panel discussion as part of this session, where he spoke in detail about changes in logistics businesses related to the growth of e-commerce.

“The advancing development of e-commerce in the past five years – the B2C segment is growing five times faster than B2B – has led to the fact that Internet retailers now account for about half of DPD in Russia’s volume. The segment specifics are cardinally different: in B2B, the customer is the sender, while in B2C, the customer is in fact a receiver,” the speaker noted. “It is precisely for him that we made the DPD mobile application, in which it is possible to change delivery conditions based on preferences for time, date, location, or even to cancel the order.” Overall, IT requirements have significantly changed: it is necessary to develop new services and software for the needs of B2C, which are completely different from previous ones developed for B2B. Today, when digitalization has touched almost every aspect of life, IT’s tasks for business come to the forefront.”

At the same time, the automation of warehouse processes, according to the Director General of DPD in Russia, is becoming economically feasible with the volume of online orders amounting to at least several tens of thousands a day.

Commenting on the specifics of online and offline retail, Nikolay Voinov drew the audience’s attention to the fact that, regardless of how the goods are purchased, for the consumer the opportunity to manage their client experience is the most important: “Today the most important thing is to make the buyer happy. If he has a positive experience, then that’s success.”

The speaker also noted the differences in models of consumer behavior for online buyers in the capital and in the regions associated with different purchasing power: thus, for regional clients, the possibility of payment by installments and on credit is more important. This should also be taken into account by delivery operators, including, in particular, the possibility of longer storage times for online goods in warehouses in the regions.

Representatives of such companies as Utkonos, Orientir, FINN FLARE, Decathlon, and Alibaba Group also took part in the panel discussion.