As per other parts of the world shipping here is done by transportation and shipping companies and again just like other parts of the world they are divided to “Carriers” (who have vehicles of their own for their transportation purposes) and “Forwarders” (who don’t have vehicles such as trucks of their own but they handle transportation by hiring transportation means from others). All of these must be companies registered in Iranian company register and more importantly in/by The Ministry of Road and Transportation. These transportation companies are divided to 4 main branches being “Shipping Companies, International Road transportations, Domestic Road Transportation, Air Transportation”. A company working in one of these four fields is restricted to its own field and can’t work in other fields either by government prohibition or by practical disadvantage.
Seems the theory is getting boring so let’s go back to practice :) It might seem easy to ask one of those companies to handle your cargo, but in reality this may change to a nightmare (almost always it does!). The story is: there are at least One Thousand transportation companies who have offices in Tehran (and most of them have a small representative office in Bandar Abbas), then:
1. Most of them are forwarders and all of them pretend to be carriers. However it will be an awful mistake to think carriers do better compared to forwarders “even if they are carriers, in the last moment your cargo won’t exactly match their destination and availabilities! So most probably it will be forwarded by the carrier to others, and as carriers are no good forwarders, this way your cargo is trusted in the hands of a bad forwarder by giving it to a carrier!” (Hope you understood!) . Again one shouldn’t think a forwarder is necessarily better than a carrier in transports operations (this is the inverse of the previous mistake) because many forwarders absolutely have no idea about what are they supposed to do with a cargo and after getting it from you they will just keep searching through others until somebody will accept to take your cargo with paying a commission (brokerage) to them as first forwarder, and that second one might not be the final one and might forward it to another one, and so on. No one knows how long this chain of forwarders can be and when it comes to a risk each will put the responsibility on the other!
2. Most have the permit or privilege on only one of the categories mentioned above (Shipping Companies, International Road transportations, Domestic Road Transportation, Air Transportation), so if you ask a road carrier to handle an air cargo, or if you ask a shipping agent to accept the haulage of your containers to Caspian sea free zone and so on it may prove to be a dramatic mistake. Unfortunately no customer (specially a newcomer) can definitely say which one is doing which category!
3. For all of them the working area is specific to their destinations. For example there are companies who are only accustomed to carry containers from Bandar Abbas or other Gulf ports to Baku/Azerbayjan and they know how to do it, if you ask this company to take the container from the same port to say Mazarsharif/Afghanistan they certainly won’t be able to do so because they know nothing about this other route and destination. One who is accustomed to send full load trucks to Russia knows almost nothing about imports cargo carried by containers from China, Dubai... etc.
4. None of the transportation companies is legally permitted to do customs clearance, but all may offer it. In fact the clearance agents are separate and they have their work permit from chamber of commerce and Iranian Customs. So they will ask a customs broker to handle customs clearance.
There is much more on this issue and it will take a “Poetry book of hundred stone weight” (as per Iranian folk proverb) to describe all these issues here. Maybe there are even more complicated issues I didn’t discuss but I just wanted to give a hint.
Ooops >>> I was about to forget the main part: What do we do for you as White Rooster Business Lodge?
We don’t pretend to be transporters or forwarders or carriers. We don’t guise as one who can handle goods for all destinations in every kind of combinations. What we do is to put our 13 years of local experience (from 1997) to help you not to fall in a ditch! I have been working in international transportation business here for 7 years (3 years as managing director) We warn you that a foreign customer is a very easy victim in the complicated chaos of brokers and forwarders (I have always been an Altruist and Universalist J as Gandhi says: God hasn’t created these borders!). We won’t say we can offer this service and that service unless we find out a trustee company who really “does” so. Let’s see what’s good for you, let’s stand together.
