EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Cold chains are essential for extending the shelf life, period of marketing, avoiding over
capacity, reducing transport bottlenecks during peak period of production and maintenance
of quality of produce. The development of cold chain industry has an important role to play in
reducing the wastages of the perishable commodities and thus providing remunerative prices
to the growers. Also, it acts like a backbone for pharma industry and helps to maintain the
efficacy of the drug throughout the supply chain by providing temperature controlled
environment to sensitive pharma products.
With the growth on the domestic manufacturing and retail segments, the demand for efficient
warehouse management service has improved. Despite of the growing demand,
warehousing continues to see little investment. Current spending on organized warehousing in
India constitutes 9 percent of total logistics spending, as against 25 percent in the US.
According to the World Bank’s 2014 Logistics Performance Indicator, India is ranked 54th and is
behind countries such as Japan, the United States, Germany and China. Logistics costs
account for around 6-10 percent of average retail prices in India as against the global
average of 4-5 percent. Therefore, there is a clear scope to improve margins by 3-5 percent