The FINANCIAL — Georgia will soon be included among the 158 countries worldwide that Gebrüder Weiss has branches in.
The FINANCIAL — Georgia will soon be included among the 158 countries worldwide that Gebrüder Weiss has branches in. The first modern logistics centre in the country will be serving customers from Georgia as well as the whole Caucasus region and Central Europe by May 2013. Gebrüder Weiss, The Austrian transportation and logistics company with 500 years of history, is investing up to EUR 9 million in this project. Its official local partner is Tegeta Motors. The new enterprise will offer a range of services including groupage service, overland transport, air and sea freight and logistics solutions in the region.
The Gebrüder Weiss company has been in the Weiss family for five centuries. Company turnover exceeds EUR one billion. It holds a leading position among Europe’s top transportation and logistics firms. The centre in Georgia will be the first such in the Caucasus region.
“We have a mission to connect west and east and therefore Georgia is in a strategic location for Gebrüder Weiss,” said Wolfram Senger-Weiss, Managing Director at Gebrüder Weiss. “We serve almost the whole world including very strong branches in the USA and China. The Georgian branch will be equipped with unique equipment, which will serve not only the country but the whole region as well as Central Europe. We think that the Caucasus, and Georgia in particular, could be a very interesting geopolitical hub. Many of our existing customers will benefit from this expansion. Essentially we are connecting the region to the world.”
Gebrüder Weiss is proud that its warehouse will be the first modern logistics centre in the region. This was proved by the recent real estate market survey done by Jones Lang LaSalle and the Tbilisi Real Estate Conference.
“As we are seeing, and as the Conference showed us, there is a lot of room in Georgia for the development of logistics. We are the first company in this sphere, and I hope that others will follow us. We welcome others entering the market as competition is essential for the further development of the market,” he claimed.
The Ministry of Economy supports logistics market development in Georgia. “The logistics centre, which will offer the highest standard of service, will be one more step toward Georgia’s development,” said Dimitry Kumsishvili, First Deputy Minister of Economy. “The whole region will use the service offered by Georgia. We, as a state, are contributing to the sector’s development as much as we can. All official procedures are maximally simplified.”
Wolfram Singer-Weiss positively evaluates the business environment in Georgia. This was one of the incentives for Gebrüder Weiss to start business in Georgia. “We had heard that Georgia has a business-friendly environment and the period we have been operating here has confirmed this. The country is highly ranked in global ratings and our practice shows that doing business here is very easy and convenient,” he explained.
Tegeta Motors is the official partner of Gebrüder Weiss not only in Georgia but in the whole Caucasus region. “We appreciate the commitment of Tegeta Motors, which is a western-oriented and modern company that meets international standards. We couldn’t operate successfully without a good local partner,” said Wolfram Singer-Weiss.
Tegeta Motors, whose main business is offering a full assortment of auto products and auto services for corporate and retail customers, decided to start a new business line because the company has such huge foreign trade itself.
“We are opening a branch in Yerevan, Armenia, on 18 December, 2012,” Giorgi Mshvildadze, General Director of Tegeta Motors, told The FINANCAL. “Next year we are planning to expand to Azerbaijan. So this logistics centre will be very useful for us at the beginning. As well as us, a great volume of load is imported and transited in Georgia because of the country’s interesting location. The project will gain huge success in both long and short-term periods. Therefore I’m glad that Tegeta Motors is involved in one of the most successful projects not just in Georgia but in the whole of the Caucasus.”
Tegeta Motors plans to establish logistics centres in Armenia and Azerbaijan in cooperation with Gebrüder Weiss in the upcoming years.
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