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DALLAS—United Parcel Service Inc., the world’s biggest
package-delivery company, will offer paperless
international shipping to 98 countries to encourage
smaller businesses to send more goods across borders.
UPS said
it will be the first company to provide electronic
processing of customs forms, eliminating the
documentation errors that are the leading cause of
delays in global shipping.
Packages
that cross borders generate the most revenue per
shipment for Atlanta-based UPS, which wants to lower
barriers to small- and medium-sized businesses expanding
globally. UPS’s first-half revenue from overseas
shipments rose 11 percent to $4.89 billion, or 20
percent of total sales.
“International shipping is now a significant growth
engine for UPS,” Kurt Kuehn, senior vice president of
worldwide sales and marketing, said today on a
conference call. The paperless shipping and an expanded
package-return service begin January 1.
UPS
moves almost 750,000 packages across international
borders daily. Company research showed that 95 percent
of businesses with annual sales of $250,000 to $50
million don’t ship globally because they lack the
expertise, time or staffing to manage different customs
requirements and forms, Kuehn said.
“Over
the course of a year at UPS, almost 86 million pieces of
paper are attached as commercial invoices to
international small-package shipments,” Kuehn said. With
UPS’s paperless option “the process will be easier, more
cost-effective and faster.”
The
automated process, which UPS is seeking to patent, won’t
allow incomplete customs forms to be submitted, helping
reduce errors that block shipments.
---Bloomberg |
