Logistics giant DHL saw volumes at its Middle East unit decline 11 percent in February as political unrest hit business, the company’s regional managing director said.
“In the hot spots of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Algeria and Jordan in February we were down about just over 11 percent on the previous year,” Garry Kemp, managing director for Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, told Arabian Business. “That’s not alarming given what’s going on in these countries.”
Volumes fell 1.9 percent in March on the year-earlier period, Kemp said, as protests slowed and multinationals saw business return.
Turkey, Qatar and Morocco showed “extremely healthy growth” during the first quarter of the year, Kemp said, without specifying data. The firm expects to match its 2010 volumes, despite the impact of political unrest in the region.
“We’re very well experienced in coping in those sorts of environments….We only lost one day where we were unable to do deliveries of collections and that was in Bahrain for one business day,” said Kemp.
DHL on Sunday launched a pilot scheme for its DHL Service Point 24/7. The scheme, the first of its kind outside of Germany, allows users to send and receive packages in five locations across the emirate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.