Rhenus has a major ambition to become a top 10 logistics company, and continued geographical growth is helping it realise its goals.
Rhenus has taken great strides to evolve internationally, says Jan Harnisch, chief executive of the Rhenus Air & Ocean division and Member of the Board of the Rhenus Group.
Today, the company provides a broad spectrum of logistics services worldwide, spanning air and ocean freight, road transport, warehousing, supply chain and contract logistics, port logistics, automotive services and a wide range of value-added solutions.
“Over the past decade, we have evolved from a predominantly European player into a truly global logistics company,” reflects Harnisch.
“As we pursue our ambition of becoming a top 10 global logistics company, we remain focused on a balanced growth strategy that combines organic growth, selective acquisitions, strong regional expertise and a globally integrated network.”
Owing to its European roots, the family-owned logistics company has traditionally maintained a strong presence across Europe.
In recent years, however, it has rapidly expanded its footprint across all major global markets.
Today, Rhenus’ growth strategy spans all major regions, including the Americas, the Middle East and Africa, where evolving trade patterns, infrastructure investments and supply chain diversification are creating new opportunities.
“While Asia remains a very important market for us, our growth story is increasingly global,” says Harnisch. “We are seeing strong opportunities across transatlantic trade, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa as customers continue to diversify their supply chains and sourcing strategies.”
2026 has been a productive year so far for the business, albeit one dominated by the Middle East conflict, reflects Harnisch.
“The Middle East disruptions had a quite strong impact on daily operations,” says Harnisch. “But during the second quarter we managed to increase our volume performance. We were able to circumvent the disruptions in the Middle East when a lot of capacity was rerouted direct from Asia to Europe.”
Despite the operational challenges, Harnisch says the Middle East continues to gain strategic importance as a logistics hub connecting Asia, Europe and Africa.
“The region is becoming increasingly important for global trade flows, and our recent investments there reflect our confidence in its long-term potential,” he says.
Asia has undoubtedly been a growth accelerator for Rhenus’ air business, confirms Harnisch.
“Especially when the US tariffs came, there was so much trade that was diverted out of China into Southeast Asia. Intra-Asia has been a very strong market for the last five to six years, so we have very solid trade routes established.”
While intra and international markets are well saturated by international air cargo companies, it helps to have a local presence to better understand and develop relationships with shippers, and meet their needs with supply chain solutions.
“For example, we have established a strong position in the Hong Kong-Thailand trade lane, as well as a cross-border network covering the whole Mekong Delta, because there are a lot of smaller countries that don’t have necessarily the direct routings that major hubs have.” says Harnisch.
“We built new concepts to consolidate volumes via trucks – land to air setups that have really served us well during the last couple of years, and the trade has been continuously growing.”
As a freight forwarder, being able to offer different solutions in periods of geopolitical and economic volatility is an important advantage.
During the US tariffs upheaval last year, shippers showed interest in switching from ocean to air, frontloading stock to beat price rises.
Then when the Middle East conflict started this year, airfreight capacity became constrained and there was increased interest from Rhenus customers in hybrid solutions often including rail or even river waterways where feasible.
Customers have had to reconsider the transport modes they traditionally relied on and adapt to alternative solutions, according to Rhenus.
“For example, trucking from EU via Turkey through Jordan into the United Arab Emirates or from China to Kazakhstan and then Kazakhstan airfreight solutions into Europe,” says Harnisch.
He said Rhenus is also looking into “stronger partnerships when it comes to the pre- and on-carriage components and the local handling” of shipment supply chains.
“I think for our customers to have the full control and flexibility within their supply chains, a big part of this stands and falls with whom you work with locally, and I think this is something that a lot of companies have been neglecting with subcontractor setups.”
Beyond Asia, Rhenus is also seeing growing demand across transatlantic and intra-Americas trade lanes, supported by ongoing nearshoring, industrial investment and supply chain diversification initiatives.
“Supply chains today are becoming more diverse geographically,” says Harnisch. “Customers are looking for resilience, flexibility and access to multiple markets, which is why having a globally integrated network is becoming increasingly important.”
Vertical heights
One of the fastest-growing markets has been e-commerce. Goods from e-commerce superhub China have been met with strong demand from Southeast Asia.
“E-commerce continues to generate significant volumes into Europe, although recent customs and regulatory changes have started to reshape traffic flows and sourcing patterns,” reports Harnisch.
High-tech is another vertical with key production sites worldwide.
Utilising high-tech hardware such as semiconductors, data centres are growing and AI is powering them.
Harnisch comments: “Since data centres are being built everywhere in the world, there are a lot of high-tech component supply chains; I would say the high-tech vertical is one of the fastest growing in the market.”
Major high-tech trade lanes connect manufacturing hubs across Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, India and China with key consumption and innovation markets in North America and Europe.
These flows reflect both rising demand for advanced technologies and the ongoing diversification of global supply chains.
Shipments are high value and in high demand and customers are willing to pay top prices for the speed of airfreight over ocean because customers don’t want “super high value cargo on a ship for months at a time”, meaning capacity is limited on certain lanes, which drives up prices, explains Harnisch.
He adds: “If you build a data centre, the part that matters most is the speed, not necessarily the price. So, companies are willing to pay a premium for more optimised and faster supply chains.”
Also, he points out that many high-tech shipments aren’t suited to travelling by ocean because they are physically sensitive, e.g. chips, and ocean shipping leaves them more vulnerable in this sense.
But the amount of capacity that has been diverted towards high-tech and e-commerce “has been cannibalising other markets”.
Harnisch adds: “The more traditional markets, such as automotive, have been struggling as well lately.”
Rhenus has seen solid growth in its life sciences and healthcare business too, Harnisch clarifies. “For Rhenus specifically, the life science and healthcare market is one vertical that we have been investing in strongly over the last couple of years and we have managed to grow steadily in.”
The sector is attracting strong demand across Europe and North America in particular, where pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies continue to invest in increasingly sophisticated and time-critical supply chains.
Americas expansion
Last year Rhenus set up air gateways in Singapore and Bangkok adding to its existing gateway in Kuala Lumpur.
In November, the business said it would “continue to identify strategic investment opportunities in Southeast Asia and the overall APAC region”.
Group wide, its acquisitions include LATAM-based ocean and air forwarder BLU Logistics in 2023.
The business, rebranded to Rhenus Logistics in April last year, enabled Rhenus to expand in South and central America and Asia.
At the same time as acquiring BLU, Rhenus purchased a 51% stake in maritime shipping agency LBH Group in 2023, which operates in 24 countries worldwide through a network of more than 100 offices across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia Pacific and the Middle East.
Rhenus completed the acquisition of LBH in April this year, acquiring the remaining 49% stake and gaining full ownership of the company.
Meanwhile, in February this year, the Rhenus Automotive division completed the takeover of Michigan, US-based Oakley Industries, which has eight sites across the US and Canada and expertise in industrial and wheel assembly.
As a result of the acquisitions and expansion within the Americas, “we saw quite an uptick going from Asia to Latin America, also via Miami”, remarks Harnisch.
“We were very Europe-Asia centric for a long time. Our objective today is to build a far more balanced global network. The Americas are a major strategic focus for us, not only because of their economic importance, but also because customers increasingly require integrated solutions connecting North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.”
Rhenus has also recently expanded its presence in the Middle East area, opening new offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi and tapping into new business areas such as events and exhibitions, and humanitarian logistics.
More acquisitions?
On the subject of whether more acquisitions may be on the agenda for Rhenus, Harnisch says Rhenus is open to possibilities, but it aims to first focus on integrating its most recent acquisitions into the business.
“At the moment, our main focus is to properly integrate these acquisitions and look into utilising the synergies.
“We want Rhenus Air and Ocean to be a scalable organisation. We want to be able to digest larger acquisitions like BLU at a faster level than we used to.”
Though there has been some major consolidation in recent years, the forwarding market has traditionally been characterised by fragmentation, meaning takeover opportunities.
“Rhenus has always been open to acquisitions, so we’ve always looked into a mix of organic growth and merger and acquisition growth, but specifically for the air and ocean business, we are currently focusing on our organic growth,” clarifies Harnisch.
“We are taking the approach where we basically build our own infrastructure, our own software, and we want to make sure that we really focus on this and then look into larger acquisitions again as the second step.”
Looking ahead, Harnisch believes long-term growth will come from a combination of geographic diversification, industry specialisation and further network expansion.
“Whether in Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Africa or the Middle East, our goal remains the same: helping customers build resilient and efficient supply chains in an increasingly complex environment,” says Harnisch.
Capacity gains
Own-controlled capacity has been another way for forwarding and logistics stakeholders to gain air cargo market share in the recent past.
During the Covid pandemic, plenty of forwarders invested in longer-term capacity agreements or their own capacity, while ocean players moved into airfreight.
But when demand dropped and rates fell, forwarders remained locked into capacity deals.
Harnisch stresses: “For Rhenus Air and Ocean specifically, our current strategy remains firmly centred on an asset-light model that allows us to provide customers with flexible access to capacity through a strong global carrier network.”
Security of supply in a climate where capacity availability on various lanes is by nature changeable is approached through partnerships.
“Geopolitical disruptions quickly change the market, which means for us it’s really important that we stick to our core carriers and partnerships to navigate situations and react quickly,” Harnisch emphasises.
“Maintaining our flexibility is crucial in the airfreight market right now.”
In any case, looking at the second half of the year and the peak specifically, Harnisch suggests that the aftermath of the Iran war will result in capacity returning to the market.
“While there is still uncertainty surrounding developments in the Middle East, we expect some of the capacity constraints experienced in recent months to ease as tensions moderate.
“At the same time, the disruption has created new routing opportunities and operational patterns, meaning the market is unlikely to return entirely to its previous state.
“Based on current market conditions, we expect more moderate peak seasons than in recent years.”
