SITE VISIT
How Tigers earned
their stripes
Felicity Stredder visited Tigers’ new UK fulfilment centre in
Thurrock to find out how the business has grown.
The Tigers business
comprises three arms:
global freight forwarding,
omnichannel fulfilment and
technology, fulfilling cargo
orders for everything from
high-end sportswear to live
lobster exports. Its latter two
divisions have contributed to
significant growth in recent
years, relates Managing
Director UK and Europe
Shahar Ayash, particularly as
e-commerce has taken off,
driving a need for companies
like Tigers to provide essential
back-of-house logistics services.
Ayash conveys the Tigers
journey up until now.
Tigers’ origins – and growth
Tigers began life as a merger
of two freight forwarding
companies, begins Ayash,
“Waco logistics, a Taiwanese
company, and Kamino
Logistics Group, which was an
American-European company.
Nine years ago, we brought
East and West together to
create one company and
named it Tigers.”
Initially, Tigers was a global
freight forwarding platform,
moving air, ocean and road
shipments; the next phase was
to grow the logistics arm and
make the facilities into omnichannel
fulfilment centres.
At 100,000 square feet, the new Thurrock
facility will only be at 50% capacity once
it is completed
“We started with e-commerce
before it became a thing,”
Ayash recalls. “We started with
e-commerce ten years ago,
when it wasn’t common as a
channel. Everybody used to
sell wholesale and retail, but it
wasn’t common to do B2C.”
Since the move to
incorporate logistics, the
business has been growing
steadily, Ayash continues.
“The biggest centre we started
was in Rotterdam in the
Netherlands, where we have
one of our flagship facilities.
In recent years we’ve made
some acquisitions, too, to
grow the company and widen
our footprint. Today, we have
offices in Australia, 15 offices
in China and 17 offices and
logistics facilities in the US.
We are in Malaysia, which is
a very important market for
e-commerce; we have our own
offices in South Africa, where
we acquired one of the first
Customs brokerage businesses
in the country, and here in
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