“Our target is ambitious in sports,” says Johannes Mikula, Regional Director at C.H. Robinson GmbH Europe B.V., in an interview with the logistics magazine OEVZ (Österreichische Verkehrszeitung). According to this, the company acting as a service provider in the international air and sea freight forwarding business will grow into the market and then expand with exemplary customer orientation.
The office leased in the Office Park 1 at Vienna Airport will only be responsible for operational tasks and customer service. Administration and accounting at C.H. Robinson are combined in “Shared Service Centers”.
The “newcomer” on the Austrian market operates a global network with local expertise. The latter come from the experts of the respective national companies, “which we want to bind to our company with an attractive working environment,” as Johannes Mikula explains. In future, the corresponding set-up will be available in the state-of-the-art Office Park 4, where C.H. Robinson GmbH will acquire offices with more than 200 m² in April 2020.
On the one hand, with the new branch at Vienna Airport, C.H. Robinson takes the business in Austria into its own hands, where up to now a cooperation with a local forwarding company has existed. On the other hand, the commitment in Eastern Europe should be strengthened from there.
Although there are already own national companies in Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania; according to management, their local gateways are still too weak, especially in airfreight, for them to be able to develop as they wish, without their own Consolidation Center at Vienna International Airport, where their own “Air Gateway Team” will be dedicated to this task.
Johannes Mikula is expecting “a great response to our offer” in the start-up phase. His optimism is based on the strong network of C.H. Robinson on the one hand in the United States, Canada and Mexico, and on the other hand in Australia and New Zealand. On these trades they were ahead of their competitors, estimates Mikula.
