São Paulo – The Saudi market is the main growth focus for Trukker, a logistics company that is the Uber of the trucking business in the Middle East. “Saudi Arabia has the highest per capita number of trucks in the world,” TruKKer founder and CEO Gaurav Biswas said in an interview with Arab News.
Based in the UAE, the four-year-old company is one of the fastest-growing logistics companies in the Middle East. The company has recently completed one big round of capital raising with a USD 23 million funding from some of its biggest investors. “Saudi Arabia continues to amaze me with how innovation is accelerating at such a rapid pace. Young Saudis are so ambitious, believe in technology, and are keen to deliver,” the CEO told Arab News.
TruKKer users can order their vehicle via an app under the slogan “any truck, anytime, anywhere.” The network has 12,000 drivers and trucks to keep the Middle East’s commercial lifelines moving. Biswas found that most cross-border truckers between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, for example, are individual owner operators, or very small transport companies.
According to Biswas, in the Saudi market, the majority are small to medium sized fleets, up to 50 trucks. A small part is built of large fleet owners — more than 500 and up to 2,000 trucks. The fragmented market, he believes, is where the opportunity lies.
In the pandemic, TruKKer kept operating, trying to learn and adjust to the developments. The impact came with the container-based trade in China, regional lockdowns, and falling industrial and consumer demand. The company is a large supplier of packaged drinking water, whose sales were heavily impacted as restaurants were closed. But TruKKer seized the moment to increase its participation in the market and acquired smaller business that were facing financial difficulties.
The company has ambitious plans. “It would be quite naive of me to say I’m going to control this market within this year or next. It’s a very large market and no one player can dominate the Saudi transportation industry. I think we can certainly become the biggest, and that’s not very far away. I would say by next year we will be doing more transactions that anyone in the market, so we would be the biggest,” the CEO said.
TruKKer vehicles carry virtually any kind of product, from petrochemicals, construction goods and equipment, steel, aluminum, and copper, through to consumer goods, paper, and packaging products. It does not transport pharmaceuticals or dangerous materials like explosives.
Egypt is a focus of expansion for TruKKer, but the company is also looking to Jordan and other countries in the Levant that do business with the Gulf Cooperation Council, as well as opportunities in the reconstruction in Iraq. The company plans at expanding, and its CEO talks about new fundraisings and does not rule out an initial public offering (IPO) in the Saudi market.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
