Logistics costs in Serbia account for twice as much in the product price as compared to the developed countries of the West, which leaves a lot of room for optimization. This is the conclusion of the conference “Logistics as the motor of the economy”, held at the Faculty of the Economics University of Belgrade.
Logistics is the industry worth $ 2,300 billion, and it’s expected that current worldwide trends will soon reach Serbia – digitization, robotization and automation of the whole process. Our near feature also is the transfer of goods by drone. This type of delivery will especially be used in the pharmaceutical industry, so we can expect that in the next 20 years most of the drugs will be delivered by drones, in short time intervals.
Experts from the Faculty of Economics and logistic companies, who participated in the discussion, estimated that sustainability will take the primacy of the price in the logistics industry. Also, the environmental side of work will be crucial for survival. The self-propelled vehicles will replace the current fleet of trucks.
“Legislation will further contribute to the importance of climate change and the increase in environmental awareness in this branch of the economy. Logistics will only survive for those who reduce emissions of harmful gases to a minimum of 20% by the year 2050, ideally at 0%,” said Darko Babić from DHL.
Another emerging trend is blockchain system, which will allow a process that takes 7 days in the traditional logistic to start and end in one moment, with one click. “All this will result in the reduction of costs, acceleration of process and further development”, Rade Stojisavljević from Milsped explained.
In recent years, Serbia has been following the trend of outsourcing logistics, which leaves the company time to focus only on the product and production process. Poor infrastructure stagnates the logistics performance of Serbia, increases the price of products, since such costs are twice as much as in the countries of the West. The advantage of the domestic economy is a good geographical position and this potential should be more used.