Standard Delivery Services is Competition Friendly - Igwe

Cyril Igwe is the managing director of Standard Delivery Services Limited, a subsidiary of Ekwos Transport. The company was established in 2003 as a transport courier company meant to ride on the parent company’s logistics to compete with others in the burgeoning postal and courier business in Nigeria. Igwe revealed that Chief Anthony Egbosimba, the chairman of the company had the vision to establish the courier outfit given the number of luxury buses he has even as he also informed that the rise of movement of goods sometime at the turn of the 90s as a result of e-commerce heightened the decision of their chairman in floating the courier company.

Igwe said the evolution of e-commerce threw up the challenge of high volume of goods that were trooping into the country to the extent that most of the conventional courier companies then were overwhelmed by such development. As a result of this, Igwe said customers naturally went to luxury bus owners and other transporters asking them to assist in the movement of goods. He said this informed the direction and vision of their chairman to establish the company to work along those routes his buses were plying then. Over the years the company saw the need to expand its haulage destinations to include Bauchi, Gombe, Yola, Kano and Kaduna as revealed by Igwe.

Igwe talked about competition in the courier business and said that without it the business would have been uninteresting. He said the transport courier companies have advantage over their conventional courier competitors as they have a larger capacity to move larger quantities of good at a time and can afford to move those volumes of items at a very competitive rate and as well deliver them professionally. He said the influx of customers at their offices is a testimony that they are doing well.

Igwe said the courier industry in Nigeria is very large and can conveniently feed the practitioners and even accommodate new courier industries coming up saying that our economy is very rich and has so many extractions of ancillary businesses which are yet to be tapped in the industry .However, he asked the government to give the system some enhancement to ensure that the courier business survives

He said the Courier Regulatory Department (CRD) of Nipost is doing wonderfully well within the circumstances which it operates in regulating the postal and courier sector.

The courier industry according to him is part of the whole economy and lamented that the whole economy is crying of infrastructure which he said is affecting the courier business. He said the industry could do a lot more if basic infrastructure had been put in place.

On the services of the company, Igwe said they are involved in nationwide delivery, city delivery, door-to-door delivery, hold for collection, haulage and a wide range of other services. The courier company is planning to increase its fleet in the next few weeks to keep to its promise of delivering premium services to its esteemed customers.