Haulio embarks on M&A for regional growth and raises Singapore’s smart haulage capabilities

Media Release

Haulio embarks on M&A for regional growth and raises Singapore’s smart haulage capabilities

• Haulio set on acquiring Logol, the first logistics platform in Indonesia, to integrate with the country’s largest port, terminals and container depots;
• Signs MoU with NUS College of Design and Engineering to develop Singapore’s first-of-its-kind smart haulage scheduler for the industry;
• Debuts its latest integrated e-billing payments platform, the Haulio Payments Platform (HPP).

SINGAPORE — 6 December 2022 — Haulio, Singapore’s largest and Southeast Asia’s fastest growing digital haulier, announced that the company will be securing its first overseas acquisition with a controlling stake in Logol, a Jakarta-based logistics-focused technology platform, at its fifth anniversary celebration dinner. This venture was supported by Enterprise Singapore (EnterpriseSG), who has been working closely with Haulio to formulate its acquisition strategy in new markets to accelerate its growth and achieve its vision of expanding and deepening its footprint across Southeast Asia.

With the support of EnterpriseSG, Haulio has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Centre of Excellence in Modelling and Simulation for Next Generation Ports (C4NGP) which is part of the National University of Singapore College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE) to jointly develop and commercialise the Smart Haulage Scheduler (SHS). This first-of-its-kind haulage scheduling solution is set to enhance productivity in the nation’s logistics sector.

The event was graced by Guest-of-Honour, Minister-of-State for Ministry of Trade & Industry, Ms Low Yen Ling, who witnessed the signing ceremony together with Enterprise Singapore’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Png Cheong Boon.

Powering Haulio’s Growth Regionally

Following a successful Series-A funding round led by Temasek’s Heliconia Capital earlier in 2022, Haulio has since expanded and deepened its footprint across Southeast Asia. Strategically acquiring Logol will help Haulio secure an early stronghold in the Indonesian market and expand the group’s business beyond haulage to include other integrated digital logistics solutions that Logol currently offers.

Logol, which was founded in 2018, was the first logistics technology player to integrate its platform with not only Indonesia’s largest and busiest port, Port of Tanjung Priok, but container depots and terminals as well. Logol has effectively removed cumbersome intermediaries and data entry redundancies, enabling both shippers and hauliers to be connected to key nodes within the supply chain ecosystem such as ports, customs, shipping lines and container depots.

Alvin Ea, CEO and Co-Founder of Haulio, said: “Our unwavering goal from the get-go was to transform and elevate the haulage industry through digitalisation, and whilst we have succeeded, we recognise there is still a lot of work needed to digitalise this traditional sector that faces similar productivity issues across the region. We strongly believe acquiring Logol will fast-track our growth by increasing our regional fleet coverage by another 2,000 first-mile vehicles. Likewise, Haulio’s track record as a leading digital haulier in Singapore and Thailand will help to drive growth and wallet share for Logol’s haulage arm in Indonesia.”

In addition, the merger of both companies, will enable the group to broaden its digital services beyond the trucking play. Key nodes such as terminals and container depots across Southeast Asia remain cash and paper intensive. Therefore, Haulio aims to recreate Logol’s successful technology integrations in various hyper-localised settings that are unique to this region and will set new, world-class standards that are currently lacking through technology for the first-mile container logistics sector.

The first-mile container logistics market in Southeast Asia is worth US$70 billion and Haulio is already present in the key markets of Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. With its unique strengths in the container haulage arena, Haulio will adopt a rapid land-and-expand strategy to establish a complete regional first-mile haulage coverage in Malaysia, Philippines, and Vietnam next.

Driving Singapore’s Haulage Capabilities

With the objective of driving increased productivity for the Singapore haulage industry, Haulio will work with C4NGP to develop the Smart Haulage Scheduler (SHS), a dynamic haulage scheduling algorithm.

Currently, the hauling sector continues to be plagued with inefficiencies from container tracking, drivers’ working schedule, vessel delays, inaccurate weather and traffic predictions, which can lead to poor routing strategies for hauling vehicles. This is also exacerbated by an industry-wide shortage of haulage traffic controllers, which largely deploy a mix of technology and manual planning for its operations.

There is also no widely adopted haulage scheduling systems in the industry today due to a lack of viable and complete solution that anticipates more intrinsic haulage planning needs at the operational and driver level, and simultaneously caters for the end-to-end process of container haulage operations.

Haulio aims to tackle these issues with scalable Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies, coupled with an Open API architecture that the haulage community can adopt to their existing processes. The SHS scheduling algorithm will enable a fleet’s controller to make optimal planning decisions for a list of incomplete jobs at any time in a day, taking into consideration evolving traffic and weather conditions in real time. Existing Transport Management Systems (TMS) in the market can also take advantage of the SHS to enhance their current operations.

Sebastian Shen, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Haulio, said: “Instead of individual hauliers developing new proprietary systems, the SHS will be more effective to level up digitalisation across the industry. The SHS will greatly boost productivity and eliminate all manual planning activities, enabling hauling teams to have better visibility and control over their fleet and operations, and the potential to manage a larger fleet. With a shortage of trained traffic controllers, the SHS also frees up more time for operations team to focus on higher value work and critical operational problems like service recovery, vehicle maintenance issues, customer service and driver management.”

Concurrently, Haulio will debut the newly built Haulio’s Payments Portal (HPP), an integrated e-billing payments platform that serves to alleviate the tedium of financial logistics in the hauling sector, which currently requires meticulous manual entries of invoicing, tracking, and follow-up of bills.

With HPP, hauliers can view their end-to-end haulage management process, and gain a comprehensive overview of invoices with various statuses immediately which would greatly speed up the billing process of hauling jobs. To elevate micro to small haulage business owners, the HPP will soon be able to enable early pay-outs, allowing hauliers to have better control in managing their working capital.

Mr Law Chung Ming, Executive Director, Enterprise Singapore, said: “We congratulate Haulio on its fifth anniversary. The growth of this local start-up into a regional technology firm over the past five years has been incredible and we are proud to have been part of this exciting journey. Enterprise Singapore looks forward to supporting more companies like Haulio in addressing common gaps in the industry, and to tap on new growth opportunities to scale further into the region and beyond.”

Headquartered in Singapore, Haulio began as a two-person team in 2017 and has since grown to a team over 100 employees strong in Southeast Asia today. As Haulio continues to develop, the organisation expects to increase their regional technology and product team headcount by double in the next three years and will continue to create higher value-added job roles in the industry such as software engineering, product management and data science that will elevate the industry’s way of operating as current roles continue to be redesigned and augmented.