Gulf Agency Company Ltd.
Private Company Incorporated: 1956 Employees: 6,000 Sales: $1.2 billion (2005 est.) NAIC: 484110 General Freight Trucking, Local; 484121 General Freight Trucking, Long-Distance, Truck-load; 484122 General Freight Trucking, Long-Distance, Less Than Truckload; 484220 Specialized Freight (Except Used Goods) Trucking, Local; 484230 Specialized Freight (Except Used Goods) Trucking, Long-Distance; 488320 Marine Cargo Handling; 488330 Navigational Services to Shipping; 488390 Other Support Activities for Water Transportation; 488490 Other Support Activities for Road Transportation; 488510 Freight Transportation Arrangement; 541614 Process, Physical Distribution, and Logistics Consulting Services
Gulf Agency Company Ltd., which trades as GAC, is a leading global provider of shipping, logistics, and marine services. Its 200 offices span five continents and are staffed with knowledgeable locals. It handles logistics for a slew of multinational corporations. As part of its marine services, a fleet of crew supply vessels brings food and fresh water to oil platforms and passing freighters. Originally formed in Kuwait in the mid-1950s by Swedish shipping interests, the company is the largest shipping agent in the Middle East and operates at more than 1,000 locations around the world. Its international reach has been enhanced through acquisitions such as that of Benair Freight in 2005. GAC has a number of regional affiliates with local partners as majority shareholders. It also maintains a number of marketing alliances for regions of the world it does not cover on its own.
ORIGINS
Gulf Agency Company (GAC) was originally set up as a Kuwait joint venture in 1956 by a top Swedish shipping agency, Nyman & Schultz, looking to expedite things at the country's busy seaport at the dawn of the containerized shipping age. Nyman & Schultz dated back to Carl Oscar Strindberg's shipping agency, which had been formed in Stockholm in 1861 and acquired by the Lindberg family in the 1920s.
Offices were soon established in nearby Saudi Arabia and throughout the Arab world. Branches in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Libya would eventually be closed, however, due to the outbreak of war or nationalization. Egypt closed the Suez Canal for eight years following the Six Day War with Israel in 1967. After it was reopened, GAC handled traffic to the Suez Canal from its Athens office. GAC also had opened an office at the Jebel Ali Free Zone in Dubai.
GAC entered the Nigerian market in the 1970s, first overseeing ships to haul cement to the country's construction boom. Oil development later brought more business.
GAC opened an office in Jordan in 1985. Within about ten years, reported Lloyd's List, it was the country's leading shipping agent. The shipping business in the Persian Gulf was going through an unprofitable couple of years, exacerbated by the war between Iran and Iraq. In January 1985 GAC began operating a less-than-container-load (LCL) freight forwarding service in the Persian Gulf through its Cargo Gulf unit, which grew quickly following the end of hostilities in the region.
NEW FRONTIERS IN 1990
The fall of the Soviet Empire opened new opportunities for GAC. It became the first international shipping agent in Poland in November 1989. GAC introduced a cargo service for the former Soviet republics several years later, in 1997, attracted in part by Azerbaijani oil developments. At the same time, GAC was expanding its reach to the east, working in partnership with a local carrier in Indonesia to begin operations there. A Singapore unit had opened a few years earlier.
GAC staff had to be evacuated from Kuwait during its invasion by Iraq and the subsequent Operation Desert Storm. Growth soon resumed following this turbulence. A new door-to-door air freight unit, Air Gulf Express, was launched in May 1991. It began with connections from the Middle East to Europe and the United States. (Oil industry forwarder specialist Danaher America Inc. was its U.S. freight forwarding partner.)
In 1993, GAC spent $3 million to open a large, technologically advanced freight center in the emerging trade center of Dubai. It had a capacity exceeding 3,000 containers a year, according to Lloyd's List , and was operated by GAC's freight forwarding division, Gulf Express Freight. A portion of the facility was temperature-controlled.
GAC's Dubai distribution facility was instantly successful with multinational corporations, and underwent a $10 million upgrade within a couple of years. The shipping agent business was becoming more competitive, an official told Lloyd's List . The Dubai center offered co-packing and online services in addition to warehousing.Besides distribution and shipping agency, GAC's third main line of business was shipping support services. This included representation for property and indemnity clubs (a kind of marine insurance), repair facilities, and the ability to ferry cargo, supplies, or crew to or from passing ships that did not want to spare the time or expense of docking at port. The company was expanding the scope of its services, transporting heavy equipment such as construction cranes.
In the mid-1990s, GAC began coordinating its European ports through a common hub office. The center of GAC's trade, the distribution facility in Dubai's Jebel Ali Free Zone, was expanded yet again in the late 1990s, bringing its total capacity to 75,000 cubic meters. It also began building a 10,000-square-meter facility in Bahrain in 1999.
GAC benefited from the privatization of the agency business at the Suez Canal in 1998. The company subsequently formed GAC Egypt. The company was also active at the other end of the continent. Due to interest from its existing multinational clients in Nigeria, GAC launched operations in Angola. The company reported that within a few months, it had a 50 percent share of the tanker market there, which was booming following recent deepwater finds. GAC also was beginning to operate in South Africa.