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."