MUMBAI: June 18, 2019. Digital freight booking platform Cogoport has struck an agreement with India's largest rail haulage service Concor that will allow the country's importers and exporters to book rail freight and ocean carriage in one place.

It means shippers can now organize transport from inland factories to ship and onward to points across the globe easily at the click of a button.

Cogoport already provides a single online booking platform connecting thousands of exporters and importers with a wide range of shipping lines. Showing prices for multiple carriers in one place, it typically enable shippers to make savings of around 10% on ocean carriage. This new arrangement with Concor adds rail services to and from Inland Container Depots (ICDs) across India to the platform helping shippers to plan whole shipments whilst reducing costs port to port.

Purnendu Shekhar (pictured), founder and CEO of Cogoport said: “This agreement with Concor represents a further, significant step forward for Indian business - making their shipping easier and more connected. Some almost 90% of India’s rail freight is carried by the Concor rail network, so our partnership brings together the benefits of rail transport with our transparent marketplace for ocean carriage. For the first time shippers have a single factory-to-ship planning and booking platform. It’s a significant advance for businesses sited a long way from the sea, who can now plan logistics more easily and still take advantage of the 10-15% cost savings we typically generate on ocean carriage bookings.”

Launched in 2017, the Cogoport digital logistics marketplace has been growing at 25 percent per month by removing the traditional, lengthy and cumbersome offline quotation and booking process. It uses ground-breaking technology, algorithms and analytics to enable its users to move freight more efficiently – with a choice of providers on port pairs, dedicated back-end booking confirmation and seamless shipment tracking.

Already the platform has signed up more than 26,000 users, and is particularly popular among small and medium-size enterprises who often do not have the resources to contact multiple suppliers or the individual buying power to access competitive rates for container shipping. Rail operations are now joined with over 40 major international shipping line partners and host of other suppliers in the Cogoport marketplace to make logistics easier and fairer.