The origin and destination tariffs for all offices are set by me and my liaison team. We solicit feedback from each JVK office before the start of each calendar year, but as these tariff rates are primarily for quoting to overseas agents, they are often significantly higher than what each JVK office can quote locally.
Please note that my team and I at the liaison office quote to all overseas agents (except Asia). We use the tariffs and then we mark-up the freight cost by 30% or more, depending on the competitiveness of each situation. We may discount the tariffs from time to time as warranted to win in a competitive situation, but we try not to discount more than 20% off of the tariffs unless there are special circumstances to do so.
Each JVK office in Asia, in turn, quote to agents in Asia directly and to customers in their specific market directly. These quotes are much more price sensitive than the quotes to overseas agents outside of Asia; it is almost impossible for them to get the tariff rates. They compete with smaller moving companies and freight forwarders who offer household good moving as a sideline. This often puts significant downward pressure on the pricing. So, each office does it’s best to compete and try to sell a premium service for a higher price, but often the customer does not want to pay higher than the cheapest. In the end, their pricing is driven by the local market conditions.
I have given the regional managers (Mark Donohoe for Indochina and Paul Sutton for Magellan) the authority to monitor the costings in each of their offices and set guidelines with their respective teams directly on just how low they can quote……but in reality, the rate is dictated by the market and we either find a way to reduce our costs to offer the service at the market rate or we are not awarded any local bookings.