As business on China's Singles Day surges to new levels, upstart FORU Trucking completes 57.8% of all deliveries in the Yangtze River delta

BEIJING, Nov. 29, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Guanling Chen, technology partner of FORU Trucking, a tech-driven logistics company, delivered a keynote speech on technological innovation among road transportation fulfillment platform at the 2019 JDDiscovery on November 19.

Dr. Chen noted that FORU Trucking's real-world application and problem solving-oriented technological innovation focuses on practical fulfillment services rather than on the theoretical aspects of innovation. To address pain points plaguing today's road transportation industry - a lack of standardized pricing, inefficient dispatching and unreliable service quality, FORU Trucking has developed and implemented a truck logistics platform which deploys intelligent pricing, intelligent services and intelligent dispatch. The company proved the strength of its platform on November 11, or Singles Day, China's equivalent to Black Friday and the country's biggest annual online shopping event.

According to preliminary data, online payment on China's Singles Day reached 410.1 billion yuan, up 30.1 per cent year on year and resulting in the delivery of 1.657 billion packages. As the main road transportation service provider for leading express delivery firms, SF Express, Deppon and JD Logistics, FORU Trucking's platform handled 33,494 order batches between November 11 and 15, representing a 2.2-fold that of the corresponding five-day period in October. The platform took only 1 minute and 40 seconds to dispatch the first truck in the early morning of November 11.

Prior to this year's Singles Day, FORU Trucking perfected its operations strategy for individual drivers by using an algorithm to optimize pricing and dispatch orders to the best-matched drivers based on a cargo volume analysis and the drivers' most frequently travelled routes. Combined with online campaigns such as coupons and prizes offered to incentivize drivers in maximizing the number of orders delivered, drivers enthusiastically competed for the right to deliver each batch of orders. FORU Driver's  app recorded the shortest time in which an order was fully loaded to a truck at 57 seconds during the November 11 spree.

2019 is the first year that FORU Trucking's fleet worked during the peak season, the period that starts with November 11, the day of the shopping festival. With FORU Trucking's smart dispatch system, the algorithm allocated orders to the drivers, creating a new model for AI-powered truck dispatching that the company referred to as real-time optimized vehicle routing. According to FORU Trucking, its smart dispatch system sent 1,445 drivers out to transport goods to and from 136 cities during the shopping spree. In Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui provinces as well as in Shanghai, four regions featuring the highest order volumes, FORU Trucking's fleet was responsible for 57.68% of the deliveries completed by all freight companies serving the area.

Data released by the People's Bank of China showed that the total of all online payments completed on China's Singles Day was the equivalent of having every Chinese person order some 1,000 yuan worth of merchandise, while the average per capita disposable income of a resident in China during the first three quarters was 2,542 yuan per month. In other words, China's population spent approx. 40% of their monthly income in one day. Behind the strong public desire for consumption, there is huge potential for the development of the logistics markets. Emerging firms including FORU Trucking have taken advantage of latest technologies to improve efficiency. Firms capable of providing stable and high-quality services during the peak seasons via advanced technologies can look forward to differentiating themselves from competitors.

SOURCE FORU Trucking