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This is the crisis!!

Nowadays, the economic environment is …gloomy! This is mainly for the car industry. But one manufacturer still has a 2 digits growth on its sector: Let’s have a look at the situation of Mazda in Russia. As a matter of fact, the Japanese manufacturer grows month after month in the Russian market where the demand is pretty large. Mazda wants to improve the car delivery in the country of Tsars, because the particularity of Mazda is that they entirely produce their car in ... Japan!

So now let’s see what we have for a situation:
- An island (Japan)
- A 9000 km wide country (Russia)
- 73 700 cars

… What could be used?

If I tell you the plane … you’re going to laugh out loud and trucks aren’t the ideal solution neither. So we definitively have three solutions left:
Japan has one of the biggest harbors in the world, so transportation per ship could be interesting. Moreover, as an island, they don’t really have a choice. The question is, where could the ships dock when the final destination is Moscow? As you may know, the main Russian harbors are Novorossiysk, Primorsk and Sankt-Petersburg. But except for Novorossiysk (113MT in 2007) all this harbors are either tiny or too far away from the economic centers.

- If the ship docks in Novorossiysk we have to transport the car over 1500km to reach Moscow and transit time will be longer than a month … not very interesting.

- - If the ship docks in Sankt-Petersburg 700km with good infrastructures … but transit time between Yokohama and Sankt-Petersburg is awful.

- - So we have a last solution (which was choosen). Use the old soviet installations, the Trans-Siberian Railway! The ship docks in Vladivostok and the cars use the trans-Siberian to Moscow. Transit time between Vladivostok and Moscow lasts 10 days! Mazda finally has its solution.

One other advantage of this transportation mean is that the cars are inside wagons, protected against weather and robbery.

Mazda case is a good example of how to have a new efficient Supply Chain through old infrastructures.