The second-generation director of Cargo Marketing International on moving a 43-year-old freight forwarder from phone calls to software, what a year and a half in the United States taught him and why overseas partners are looking at India.
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Zubin Sangani did not set out to be a freight forwarder. After a bachelor’s degree in business administration he had “different plans”, but he was the only member of the next generation in the family business, and his uncle suggested he first work abroad. He spent about a year and a half at a logistics company in the United States before coming home to Cargo Marketing International, which his father and uncle started in Kolkata and which now has 11 offices across India. “We are a 43-year-old company now,” he says. “It’s more than my age.”
What kept him was the range. The company handles cargo for automobile, textiles, machinery and more, and each industry keeps it in touch with what is happening in the wider world.
What the United States Taught Him
The gap he saw when he returned was stark. In the United States, he says, everything was online. In India, “people used to call each other”, and many still do. So he built the lessons into his own company: software now runs the finance side, and communication moved to email, which gave overseas partners information that was “proper, accurate, informative” and in black and white.
Timely information and timely feedback, he says, are among the main things overseas partners judge a forwarder on.
A Decade of Change, and the Gap That Remains
In his ten years in the business, Sangani has watched the industry move from manual work to automation, with AI now arriving fast. Customers are better informed too. “It’s more transparent,” he says. “People are more knowledgeable, more educated.”
He estimates that India’s systems and automation still need another five to ten years to catch up. In his view, government portals need to be more advanced, more informative and more transparent, and there is rarely one desk to go to with a problem. “The responsibility keeps on changing,” he says.
A Name With a Story
Cargo Marketing International is, as Sangani admits, a slightly misleading name. His father and uncle once represented a South African company of the same name in India, and the name also exists in Germany and Spain. When that arrangement came to an end, the family asked to keep it.
The accounts are separate, he says, but the companies know each other. The opportunity, in his view, is India itself. New trade lanes and new products keep opening up, and he describes logistics as a “very big boom”.
“People abroad are eyeing India. It’s the next market after China.”
