XL9: BERNARD HOR - Digital Warehousing and The Logistics Challenges in Supplying Southeast Asia’s 600 million consumers

With 600 million people and over 30,000 islands, the region of Southeast Asia presents both vast opportunities and challenges. How does a Durian fruit farmer in Thailand ship orders to buyers in Jakarta Indonesia? Regional logistics are evolving fast to cope with managing the supply side infrastructure challenges and growing middle class consumer expectations about delivery times.Bernard Hor of Hatio is well positioned to address these challenges. A 5 hour flights from their Kuala Lumpur headquarters in Malaysia, can reach half the world’s population or 3.5 billion people (a similar flight from SFO will reach only 700 million). From this vantage point, Bernard is working to deploy digital warehousing solutions to take the region’s small businesses (Mom and Pop stores) through the digital transformation process and ready them for the demands of regional ecommerce. This is not a goal you can achieve successfully through powerpoint presentations and live demos of logistics software like many tech companies, but by starting with a more human approach - start with the problem. In this podcast, Bernard discusses how they tailor the sales process of their logistics software to the language of those Mom and Pop stores. We also discuss the evolution of logistics in Southeast Asia, the development of “Dark Stores” and “MFCs” (Micro Fulfilment Centres), how Asia will evolve in this decade and what innovations are driving logistics in the region.