LEAP India is a leading foldable large containers rental provider across India
Tell us about your company and the concept of palletisation?
LEAP INDIA is a leading pallets and foldable large containers (FLCs) rental provider across India, which was incorporate in 2013. The objective of the company is to provide a platform where we create a lean supply chain, which will help to reduce the cost, lead to time reduction, operational efficiency, and on-time delivery of goods to customers. Palletisation is a process of storage of goods in good conditions, efficient loading and un-loading of the goods, efficient management of stocks in the warehouse and safely transporting the goods to consumers. Pallets are the structural foundation of a unit load which allows handling and storage efficiencies. While pallets support the goods in a stable manner, it is quite a new concept in India. The rate at which pallets and FLCs are adopted by Indian FMCG, Beverages, Pharma, Dairy, Logistic services providers and auto Components Company is commendable and would pick up further pace in the next two to three years. Till today, traditional method of moving goods has been in practice, which is very time-consuming, while palletiation requires no time in manual handling and no requirement or minimal requirement of the labour, which will not only save the costs of handing goods but also result in major efficiencies at the warehouse and plant level.
How are you different from others in the same pool of yours?
We are one of the leading seven companies operating in this field across the world. We are completely focused on Pallets and FLCs, which has really helped us to get in to in roads of more than 350 corporates.
We are very well funded in terms of both equity and debt, which should take care of next two to three years of our expansion plans. We have made enough progress on working with almost all leading FMCG, Beverages and automobile companies in the country. There are only two major large companies currently operating in the country and we are one of them.
The entire raw material used in making our pallets like wood and nails are completely imported and very well standardized to the international standards of pallets.
The emergence of technological innovations such as Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence has influenced almost all industries today. In your opinion, how are these technologies going to impact the supply chain management area in reducing costs and adjusting to volatile markets?
We use MY-LEAP, an IT platform developed in-house to manage our pallets and FLCs across the sites of our customers spread across India. This enables us to put our pallets and FLCs on efficient utilisation and accurate rental billing. AI is going to change the way the goods are stored and transported in India. We are already using AI to plan our pallets requirement and deployment based on the patterns we analyse from the rich data points we had generated in the last couple of years of our operations. This would help us to track from both usage and future requirement of pallets and FLCs for our current clientele. We have recently implemented CRM in our company to become more efficient in managing our customer relations.
What kind of clients profile do you and how many pallets and FLCs have been deployed already?
While corporates from FMCG, Beverage industries mainly use pallets, while corporates from automobile and Pharma industry use Foldable Large Containers (FLC’s). With over 14 manufacturing centers and 22 warehouses, we are currently working with over xxx corporates from food, beverage, e-commerce, logistic service providers, Pharma, automobile and dairy industry.
1.7 million Pallets and 40 thousand FLCs have been deployed and expected to increase this number substantially in the next two to three years with the current capital and debt we have raised recently.
Where do you see yourself five years down the road and how well are you funded to take care of this growth?
LEAP would like to make India’s supply chain lean and cost effective. Company would become the preferred partner for corporates to provide lean supply chain solutions like providing pallets, FLCs and Forklifts. We have strong patronage of investors who have been supporting us and participated in multiple rounds of raising funds. Mayfield and Sixth Sense are our large investors. We have so far raised Rs. 150 crore of equity and Rs. 200 core of debt. Besides, the company has raised Rs. 200 crore additional debt from Piramal Capital & Hosing Finance to take care of expansion plans for the next two years
