On January 4, 2017, the Ministry of Transport published on its official website the full text of the Notice on Further Promotion of Multimodal Transport which was jointly issued by the 18 departments including the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Development and Reform Commission, putting forward the development goal of “trying to achieve 1.5 times increase in terms of multimodal transportation volume by 2020”. The series of documents indicate the arrival of spring for multimodal transport.

At present, the platform of carrier-free (multimodal transport) carrier is still in chaos. As numerous logistic platforms want to take a share of the profits, such things as close-quarter fighting or customer snatch are inevitable. Once in the future when the platform enterprise is born to “end the division”, it should not only have the basic properties of the internet-like platform but also public property so as to achieve both business value and social value. The basic properties of the Internet-like platform are: entry, growth, iteration and ecology.

It is noteworthy that the platform built by the carrierfree carrier not only needs to meet the business logic, but also should have public properties which are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

Firstly, releasing government regulation pressure. The shipping logistics platform ensure the authenticity of logistics by using the technology of evidence chain anticounterfeiting, namely, data + location identification technology to break the bottleneck of evidence security, storage and real-timeness. At the same time, the electronic contract and orders, electronic insurance policies, electronic bills of lading and flow payment generated in the logistics implementation process provide the legal basis for the authenticity of the logistics. As a result, enterprises entering the platform cannot evade tax and unscrupulous enterprises cannot enter the platform either. The shipping logistics platform will integrate the “small, scattered and disorderly”market, and in turn the healthy and effective market will greatly release the government's regulation pressure.

Secondly, lifting of the long-standing industry defects. China’s logistics market is characterized by fragmentation. On the one hand, the market structure is derived from the fact that government supervision insist on grasping big and releasing small matters which makes the large enterprises take too much responsibilities for safety and society and make it hard for them to be competitive; on the other hand, it is also derived from those behaviors of the self-employed such as weakening responsibility for safety and tax evasion which are boosted by the abnormal management and supervision of the government. The shipping logistics platform replaces the old business logic with a new one which improves efficiency significantly and sweeps away long-standing abuses. Behaviors such as tax evasion, freight arrear or stock perseverance are much less because of the new mode and dishonest behaviors are significantly reduced. With increasing the default cost of practitioners, the market has abandoned the abnormal habit that “bad money drives out good money,” which can significantly reduce the cost of government market regulation.

Thirdly, being compatible with vulnerable groups. It is far from enough by just fulfilling the needs of users and having the ability to develop for multimodal platforms, they need to establish the core values of the enterprise from the first day. This core value must be compatible with the socialist core values, have the sense of social responsibility recognized by the public, pass positive energy through building the new business model, be able to take into account the interests of vulnerable groups, be recognized by the majority and benefit them, and bring new value to the upstream and downstream industry chain. The shipping logistics platform can incorporate numerous truck drivers and boat people who are honest and trustworthy into the platform and provide services of financing, cargo insurance, insurance as well as payment of value-added tax, and in this way have a knowledge of overall operation of the self-employed through the big data gathered by the platform which can be used as the basis for future government support policies and institutional evolution.

The mechanism construction of multimodal transport and the practice of enterprises

By Xie Xie