Philippe Somers has launched ACE 54 Project Management – a Dubai-headquartered company that will enable niche and medium-sized international project forwarders to participate in African door-to-door tenders.
ACE 54 said that smaller project freight forwarders targeting the African market are, in many cases, rejected at the tendering stage – often due to a lack of owned offices and an insufficient continental network.
Supported by a carefully vetted agency network spanning 54 African countries, ACE 54 acts as the internal pricing desk for the international project forwarder, while providing technical information and implementation advice.
Somers said that in the three months since its establishment, ACE 54 has represented five European and three Asian project freight forwarders with multiple tenders to Africa. “We were convinced of the opportunities ACE 54 was going to offer the international project forwarder,” he stated, “but considering that it requires a change of mind-set for the forwarder, we did not expect to receive this much interest in such a short timespan.”
Somers is well known in the project freight forwarding sphere; he stepped down from his role as senior vice president of Industrial Projects at Geodis at the end of 2018, before joining deugro as the company’s vice president of corporate business development.
