Thominet tries to keep in good shape – physically – and with him the GSSA that he heads also believes in keeping fit and fine.
With chairman Bertrand Schmoll in command, ECS has set its sights on its turnover to reach US$1.1 billion in 2015: A whopping increase of around $230 million (2014 sales: $928 million).
Among its clients are Brussels Airlines Cargo, ANA Cargo, China Southern Cargo, Turkish Airlines Cargo and quite a few others.
For the group then, the main business drivers will be focus on acquiring airline customers from developing markets. “We are now targeting East Asia and India which are expanding and are growing markets due to globalisation of trade and development of e-commerce,” said the COO.
“Thanks to the opening of borders and thanks to globalisation, we can reach out to all countries from ASEAN and also access the fast-growing niche markets such as the Asian-Indian region where activities and trade is on a very positive upswing”. Along with East Asia and India, incidentally, ECS has Latin America in its sights.
Last year, for example, saw the group securing AirAsia India’s business along with that of Philippines Airlines (US West Coast sales) and Royal Air Maroc (France, UK, Belgium). These were in addition to the group’s existing 29 mandated carriers along with the partnership with DHL Aviation and Qatar Cargo.
ECS Group’s expansion in a challenging market does not come as a surprise. Latest cargo figures point out that GSAs have strengthened their position in air cargo: More than 20 per cent of worldwide revenues were generated through sales under GSA agreements. In fact, GSAs showed a higher than average volume growth coupled with less yield loss. What is it that GSAs are doing right?
The ECS strategy
ECS, for example, has chalked out its strategies for growth. Thominet said that today, the group was clearly focused on innovation and emphasised that “new services must be offered to airlines”. He went on point out that ECS was committed to “being the leader in our everyday work. For us and hence for the airlines that we are representing, it is more than valuable to work on creating new roads in conjunction with interline solutions. Hence we can hit the whole world,” he said.
Schmoll is equally unequivocal, saying that meeting the airlines’ growing needs “requires us to be highly disciplined and organised. Sales activity is our core business, it is our DNA. Revenues depend on the generated sales. That is why,” he emphasised, “we need to be strong sellers in order to find the balance” and satisfy both airlines and forwarders.
Higher revenues have come with the spotlight on improving information flows. As Thominet put it, ECS’ goal is to provide to its clients and partners clear and accessible information. “Indeed, we surely worked on improving the quality of messages, though always with the idea of being transparent. Beyond this transparency, we have to reflect trust and reliability. This enables us to build a powerful and efficient commercial strategy,” he said but was quick to underline the fact that “we cannot pretend…we must be foolproof”, he said.
ECS has capitalised on total cargo management for an airline. This is becoming increasingly popular with carriers primarily due to rising costs. Royal Maroc tried it with ECS. The carrier used to do its own sales, but later gave the responsibility to ECS.
Today, ECS handles Royal Maroc’s traffic from Europe to Morocco as well as sales on the airline’s flights from the US.
Perhaps, what is important is that ECS also provides a wide range of services that include bringing goods by road, Customs clearance, invoicing and data control and automated status reporting. The tasks together make up ‘Total Cargo Management’.
The last words came from Schmoll when he underlined that the ECS Group needs to be best GSSA not only for our customers, “but also for our employees.
Our employees like working for a healthy company and the better we are, the better they are. This is a virtuous circle which benefits all.”
