India is a very important market for us. We have been here as a leading international express provider through scale and through quality. We have expanded particularly our local warehousing and distribution business, DHL supply chain, significantly over the last years. We are also investing heavily in our domestic express and parcel network, which trades under the established brand of Blue Dart.

In Delhi, we opened one of our facilities where we’ve invested a bit more than €20 million, and it includes features of sustainability. So it carries the 600 kilowatt solar instalment, for instance. What’s also important to note is we added two aircrafts last year to the fleet of Blue Dart enabling additional routes, and additional capacity.

We generally make those plans by divisions.

So we invested significantly in the past three years also ahead of need in the warehousing footprint. For instance, this was about €200 million in investment, that we’ve already made. The upgrading of Blue Dart as it relates to both the fleet as well as infrastructure of the last year is a similar amount. So this is what we have already done. The divisions have announced and will continue that type of investment.

The other 200 million of Blue Dart went into the fleet expansion. We added two aircrafts, and the infrastructure, like the hub, we opened it today. We plan to open another even larger hub in the Delhi area, in the middle of 2025. So it’s an ongoing investment at a rate that is quite high and that will continue to strengthen our market position here.

So that is, depending on how you exactly cut the segments. We are clearly the leader in international express including on scale. We also are leading in the documents and B2B air segment, where Blue Dart is the clear leader.

If you take the overall domestic market, we are one of the big players, but our share in e-commerce for instance, is not as large given that we focus on the upper end, shipments on higher value goods that require a premium service. That’s the primary focus we have through Blue Dart in the Indian domestic market.

So we are enabling processing of larger amount of shipments. The facility we opened today can process about 500,000 pieces.

We’ll open a facility, later this year, which is even larger than that. So we do invest and also cater for e-commerce. That’s definitely true here in India as well as in other markets where we are present as DHL. But you also rightly said, in the high volume markets, we are selective. We are also very selective as it relates to quick commerce.

Given that we’ve seen in many markets that consumers are not willing to pay the costs associated with such service and that it remains a niche. So we are clearly a player in e-commerce, but we play on in those areas that we as DHL and through Blue Dart can serve well.

We are open for partnerships, and we do this in many ways.

We have other partners in the Universal Postal Union that helps support a global mail network, but also the distribution of partners. We have overall 17 airlines, which we sometimes own completely. We can do that in Europe because we are a European company. But in other markets we do have partners.

We have our setup here in India with Blue Dart Aviation. We have an Indian carrier with an Indian LOC and Indian operating license. And, that setup has served us very well.

We are also interested in multimodal transport. We do this in many markets and we have also for reasons of sustainability, a great interest in rail. But the system needs to be performing. That is a requirement that applies (not just) in India, but implies in other markets as well.

We operated a lot of trains from China to Europe, but due to the conflict around Ukraine and Russia’s role, it has reduced.

In Europe (we) have a strong rail business as well, but some national players have issues, to compete with road transport in terms of quality and reliability. And I think that has also been the concern here in India.

There are several factors that play a role here. First of all, we have been quite disappointed about the economic development in Europe. It was a relatively slow year, many macro-economists forecasted a much better macroeconomic development of Europe. So that’s weighing on our business. We see continued tensions impact some trade lanes.

But what is important to note is that, trade is still growing.

We do see for instance that the trade between the US and China has been contracting over the last 3 – 5 years. And so, we are specifically focused on those areas and sectors that are growing, which are geographical and trade lane oriented.

We’ve also seen lanes that have been growing very strongly and that we’re starting to talk also about sectors like science and healthcare, where we also see a lot of growth.

No, I think, Indian economy is strongly driven by domestic consumption. It has always been like that. The tendency on exports is still currently relatively low. So I don’t see a negative spill-over from Europe.

We have seen more volatility in the global trading system that was triggered by some changes and initiatives of different countries. We have seen Brexit as one major change to the European trading system which has done no good for the UK people, and particularly SMEs have suffered quite a bit.

It is our role to facilitate global trade. And we as DHL try to remind stakeholders of the positive impact trade can have.