LIFESTYLE
The Battle of Hong Kong’s
Delivery Services By Ben Coulter | Photography by Tallie Lin | Layout by Maegan Wang
If you have been to an MTR station in the past year, you have probably seen one of the fluorescent pink Foodpanda ads shining in your face, claiming to be the fastest and most convenient way to get food. Walking along the streets of the city, you have probably spotted the green HKTV Mall stores perched on street corners, while the packages you order zip through the streets in DHL, Fedex or SF Express vans. Hong Kong is filled with a variety of logistics companies who are engaged in a fierce battle of costs and competition, as they try to conquer the deceptive delivery market of the city. Being a global cosmopolitan environment, it may be expected that Hong Kong would boast the same lightning fast delivery times that are seen in Mainland China or the United States, however, the unique geographical and demographic situation of Hong Kong has made it much more challenging to roll out such programs than in other countries. To understand the Hong Kong delivery market, we must understand how the delivery industry actually started. One key form of delivery that has been prevalent for centuries is the shipping of letters and parcels. Prior to the modern world we live in today, messengers would ride horses for hundreds of miles and then pass their item over to another colleague in a vast network of horseback messengers. In 1889 however, a new type of delivery surfaced, with King Umberto and Queen Margherita getting pizza delivered to their palace, generally regarded as the first official food delivery. A few years later, an evolution of this idea caught on in India, in the form of Dabbawalas (literally translated as “one who carries a box”). These delivery men would sometimes hang an incredible fifty metal lunch cans on the sides of their bicycles and take them through the bustling city centers of India 58 XH26.indd 58
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to deliver hot lunches to workers. In fact, this method has been so successful that Dabbawalas are still prominent today, with the trusty meal delivery service even operating without the use of modern technology. Through these two examples, we could see the formation of two delivery types. Infrastructural delivery with horseback messengers and integrated network delivery with Dabbawalas. Up until the 2000s, there was not much that could be done to improve infrastructure based delivery, as there was no way to manage orders and people simply went to their district shopping malls and stores to buy all their products, however, the internet changed everything. With the rise of the web, one could simply go onto a webpage and order whatever they wanted, without even having to stand up (which of course at the time was revolutionary). To complement this, there was a new challenge for delivery services, as they had to figure out a way to get orders placed online for products located across the globe to individual homes in totally different countries, all in an accurate and convenient manner. A key player which shaped the evolution of infrastructural delivery is a company named Amazon, with their founder Jeff Bezos originally starting out by running an online bookstore. As his business grew and the market adapted, he began to sell different items, slowly but surely growing into a respected platform for online shopping, however, to become the world’s largest ecommerce platform, they had to nail delivery. With this goal in mind, Bezos fully focused Amazon’s efforts on achieving this, and slowly but For Amazon to become what it is today, they had to spend billions of dollars, purchasing thousands of delivery vans, a fleet of cargo aircraft, constructing mammoth fulfillment centers, working with
XIAO HUA 27/5/2022 7:23 AM
