6 THE INTERVIEW AIR CARGO NEWS | 08 SEPTEMBER 2014 THE AIR CARGO NEWS INTERVIEW Still going strong 40 years on Quick Cargo Service has survived four decades as an independent forwarder STEPHAN HALTMAYER tells Peter Conway why I s this a good time to be setting up as an independent forwarder? Stephan Haltmayer (pictured), managing director of Germany’s Quick Cargo Service QCS wonders. “There are now so many regulations that I am not sure I would recommend anyone to start a forwarding business these days,” he says. “You have to be ISO, AEO, a Secure Agent, IATA-registered and so forth, and the margins are not so good that you can become a millionaire. Maybe that is why there are not so many new companies coming into this industry anymore.” Entrepreneurs will always overcome such challenges, however, and that was certainly true of Dieter Haltmayer, Stephan’s father, who founded QCS 40 years ago in conditions that were even less favourable. At the time he was cargo sales and service manager for Air Canada in Germany, and the carrier wanted him to move to London to become cargo manager there. Despite having nothing against London or the UK - he even had an English wife - Haltmayer wanted to remain in his native Germany and so decided instead to set up on his own as a forwarder. Lots of his contacts promised to support him with business, so everything looked promising. Then came the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 between Israel and Egypt, and following that a crippling oil embargo by the OPEC states that saw oil prices quadruple and Western economies crumble. Into this environment QCS was born in 1974. The promised support failed to ACN_785_6-7.indd 6 materialise. Unable to get German export business, Haltmayer had to be creative. “He went after every bit of business he could get,” his son relates. “He did customs clearance for carpets and for batik fashion imports. He even provided a service for passengers who arrived at the airport with items that needed customs clearance.” Other lines included importing live tropical fish and organising freighter charter flights to Mecca for a company selling suitcases to Hajj pilgrims. “It was that business which made him enough money to start having employees,” Stephan Haltmayer remembers. The first to join was Wolfgang Patzke, who became Haltmayer senior’s righthand man, organising the forwarding operations while Haltmayer went out and got the sales. To do this he travelled extensively. “My father was one of the first to realise that you get business by talking to consignees overseas,” says Stephan Haltmayer. “He did a lot of travel in Asia and got orders from there. We also got a reputation as a reliable partner who did what we promised and paid on time. A good reputation is more important than anything else in this business.” This largely remained the model for the company until 2000, when the business started to change. With the arrival of the euro, QCS started gaining more Asian and US shipments for Germany consignees, and its export business also grew considerably to account for as much as half of turnover. For the first time in its history the ‘There are now so many regulations that I am not sure I would recommend anyone to start a forwarding business these days’ company also started to expand out of Germany, opening an office in Amsterdam in 2004; Basel in 2008; Zurich, Copenhagen and Warsaw in 2010; and London in 2013. Whereas once the aim was to be a strong player in Germany, now the home market is the whole of Europe. Stephan Haltmayer says more offices are on the cards - Vienna being the next probable target. “We see a lot of opportunities to grow in Eastern Europe and we alr-eady employ someone in Hamburg, our seafreight hub, to look at opportunities there. In conjunction with our office in Poland we are certainly aiming to gain market share there.” Growth at QCS has always been organic, never by acquisition, one small exception being its new London office, where it acquired an existing company. “Half of all acquisitions fail,” Haltmayer says, “because you can’t buy people and this is a people business. So when we want to expand we always put our own person into that market.” Nor has the Haltmayer family, which still owns QCS outright, ever been tempted by the many offers from larger entities to buy their business. Stephan Haltmayer quips that in any case it is not his decision (his father remains the majority shareholder), but more seriously points 04/09/2014 15:28