Kingway Transportation Company Limited
Shenzhen, China Site Visit
January, 2013
By
Eric Xiang

Key Personnel:
Wu Shiquan, General Manager
Tang Jijun, Vice General Manager
Wang Wen, Marketing Manager
He Yongwei, Marketing Dept.

Kingway Transportation Company Limited was founded in 1997. It is headquartered in Shenzhen, China with branch offices in Beijing, Dongguan, Guangzhou, Jiangmen, Nanjing, Ningbo, Shanghai, Shunde, Tianjin, Wuhan, Xiamen and Zhuha. It also has offices in Hong Kong and the United States. More than 200 employees work for the company.

Kingway Transportation is a freight forwarder focused on ocean freight. It has an NVOCC (non-vessel operating common carrier) license. Its annual ocean freight volume is about 40,000 TEUs (20′ container equivalent units). It handled 30,000 TEUs in the first three quarters of 2012.

It handles air freight, but it has the Class A license for air freight here in China. It books space from other local agents for all of its air business.

Kingway Transportation is invested by COSCO Hong Kong, so most containers are shipped by COSCO vessels. It does not release freight to other ocean carriers.

Kingway Transportation started business on the China-U.S. lane because COSCO is a key carrier on the lane. Currently, the China-U.S. lane accounts for only 10 percent of volume, Europe and the Mediterranean lane takes a larger share, and the rest goes to Africa and the Asia Pacific.

Although Kingway Transportation is focused on ocean freight only, it can handle booking, warehousing, stuffing/unstuffing, customs clearance, inspection and quarantine, insurance, etc. for all shipments. It has dedicated partners for trucking and customs clearance and can handle LCL (less than container load) shipments, if required.

Kingway Transport has its own transportation management system “SA2000” which can easily link to COSCO’s system for real-time container tracking. This has made it more competitive than other local ocean freight forwarders.

Since 2002, Kingway Transportation has acquired the quality management systems certificate ISO 9001:2000 branch by branch.

As a member of the COSCO Group, it is easy for Kingway Transportation to maintain a good customer base. Skechers, Payless, and Bed, Bath & Beyond are some of its apparel/shoes and retail customers. Ceramic tiles, building materials and hardware are other industries served. Kingway Transportation has its own sales team of eight at its Shenzhen office. Since all shipments are shipped by COSCO and the ocean freight rates are more expensive than market rates, it needs to find suitable commodities and customers. This is a challenge for the sales team.