Flexport is opening its first warehouses in Hong Kong and Los Angeles to serve as “fast-paced consolidation and deconsolidation points”.

The freight forwarder says it ships more freight between Hong Kong and Los Angeles than any other city pair, so they are a natural starting point for its network of physical logistics centres.

It says centres will help keep rates low as multiple clients’ cargo will be consolidated into fewer shipments, reroute and separate out key portions of shipments, reducing transit time and associated opportunity costs, and cut out communication challenges, inefficiencies and mistakes that can occur when relying on third parties for these services.

Flexport has sales and service offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Shenzhen and Hong Kong and intends to develop a world-wide network of logistics centres alongside future global service offices.

Warehousing capabilities are inherently valuable the company says and physical centres for consolidating, labeling, and routing cargo offer Flexport clients more tools to run better supply chains, and enable it to consolidate freight from many different clients on a single shipment, managing its own centres will give us the ability to reroute cargo in transit.

Flexport says when a container arrives at its Los Angeles facility, the team will pull the rerouted pallet, relabel it, and arrange for delivery to the new destination while the remaining pallets continue on their original journey.