TradeLens was founded in 2018 by global logistics company Maersk in partnership with IBM, with the aim of accelerating the digit
05 Dec 2022, 09:33
TradeLens was founded in 2018 by global logistics company Maersk in partnership with IBM, with the aim of accelerating the digitisation of international supply chains and becoming a global plaftorm for the exchange of documents based on blockchain technology. This week, Maersk announced that TradeLens will be closed. "We have succeeded in developing a working platform, but unfortunately we have not succeeded in developing global industry cooperation. TradeLens has not been commercially viable and has not met its financial targets", Maersk wrote. Maersk therefore decided to invest in other new solutions for digitising supply chains instead.A child of the blockchain fever "TradeLens was born as a child of the blockchain fever about five years ago. This is not a sign that blockchain technology has no future in shipping, because it is probably useful for certain applications. It is mainly the fact that the fate of new technologies is mainly related to commercial use and not so much to the sophistication of the technology," wrote global logistics analyst Lars Jensen on Linkedin.CargoX vs TradeLens In 2019, we wrote that Slovenian blockchain platform CargoX for document transfer based on blockchain technology beat TradeLens. CargoX won two awards for the most innovative solution of 2019 in a competition with TradeLens and several other international companies at the Transport Logistics Meeting in Dubai.The difference between CargoX and IBM's solution for Maersk How is CargoX's solution different from TradeLens? The TradeLens logistics platform originated as an in-house solution at Maersk, developed by IBM, and only later started to be opened up to other users, Štefan Kukman explained to us in 2019. According to Kukman, this is why shipping companies were cautious, because they thought that Maersk would gain a competitive advantage by hoarding competitors' data. "The transport industry is aware that those who have the information will also have more market power, so they are looking for independent solutions like ours. We are betting on a decentralised, encrypted and transparent solution. We enable the transfer of ownership of a waybill, which our users can use a cryptographic key to transfer to someone else or to prove that they are the owner of the document or that they are the owner of the goods," said Štefan Kukman, founder of CargoX, at the time. The main difference between the two platforms, in short, is that there have been no transactions through TradeLens, while CargoX carried out the first transfer of a bill of lading between China and Copor using the blockchain platform back in 2018.A major turning point for CargoX came last year, when they closed a major deal with the Egyptian government. They added to their single information window the possibility of an export document transfer service via Cargox blockchain technology. There are now more than 95 000 registered users on the CargoX platform, mostly exporters and freight forwarders, for whom the platform makes their processes much easier. A major turning point in the development of CargoX was the alignment of all processes with the requirements of the P I marine insurance clubs, which play an important role in the shipping industry due to the high values of containerised cargo, which was already completed in 2019.In Egypt, they will be extended to air transport In Egypt, the operation of the document transfer platform was first tested for eight months, and then in October last year, the transfer of documents using CargoX technology became mandatory. In practice, this means that if any exporter wants to ship cargo to Egypt, they must use their platform. As a result of the contract with Egypt, CargoX's revenue soared last year, sales increased to just over €31 million and net profit jumped to €10.8 million. According to our unofficial data, they expect revenues of around 100 million euros this year and a correspondingly higher profit. They will keep their development in Slovenia and will also open a company in Geneva and Egypt, where they already have offices.