CAN TRAVEL winter 2008/2009 "One example was when shipping to India in the early 1980s, and there were no shipping containers. If the ship encountered heavy seas, which was not rare at all, water would leak in. You can just imagine what would arrive at the other end - 5,000 cases of beer in soggy cartons. It became nearly impossible to offload. This was a real logistical nightmare at the time, which continued until the early 1990s, when containers became available. "In one case that I remember clearly, we had to ship our beer to the Indian port of Madras. There was a passenger ship with cargo capacity that sailed every third week -18 days there and 18 days back. What was puzzling was that with each sailing, we lost an average of 15 cartons of beer. To investigate, some of our people travelled to Madras with the ship, and watched the unloading. They were using a human chain to offload the vessel, passing the cartons from hand-to-hand all the way from the port to the warehouse. Of course, these labourers would get thirsty, so effectively, a percentage of the beer that was being fed into the human chain at one end was not emerging at the other as it was being 'used' to fuel the chain. "More recently, before we switched to local production in Indonesia, I was called by the port authority at the Batam duty free zone near to Singapore. They told us that our Heineken® cans were floating in the sea near the harbour. What had happened was that a wave had swamped and sunk one of the shallow wooden boats, carrying 20,000 cases of Heineken. The cartons then disintegrated and the cans came bobbing to the surface. We had to find people with fishing nets who could then drag the cans of beer ashore. Today, the majority of shipping uses containers, and the rest - roughly 55% of Heineken Far East's business involves supplying ships for on-board consumption. "For a number of years, we have been multi- sourcing product for our exports, not only from the Netherlands but also from Malaysia and Singapore," says Wilson. But exporting to land-locked countries like Cambodia, Laos and Mongolia presents their own logistical nightmares, not the least of which involve the fact that beer destined for these countries must first travel through another country."

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World of Heineken | 2008 | | pagina 18