SME Freight Forwarders Told: Pharma Margins Demand Specialist Expertise, Not Just Certificates

SME freight forwarders chasing pharmaceutical logistics margins should not compete head-on with multinationals — they should become indispensable specialists, Pharma.Aero secretary general Frank van Gelder told The Loadstar.

His message lands as rising demand from clinical trials, time-critical healthcare shipments and advanced therapies opens room for smaller operators. But van Gelder drew a hard line between opportunity and qualification: GDP compliance, qualified personnel, validated procedures and temperature-control competence form the foundations of any credible operation. A certificate alone, he said, proves nothing about whether a forwarder actually understands the cargo.

Where are the openings for smaller forwarders?

Van Gelder identified five concrete spaces where SMEs can win:

• Clinical trials logistics
• Time-critical healthcare shipments
• Advanced therapies
• Specialised regional corridors
• High-touch services around research centres and hospitals

The common thread is proximity and precision — freight that cannot tolerate a missed connection or a mishandled temperature excursion, moving in lanes where local knowledge carries real weight.

"SME forwarders should become indispensable specialists," van Gelder said. "An SME can combine local knowledge, quick decision-making and trusted international partners. Emerging connections with Chinese and Indian innovation ecosystems can create further possibilities, provided operators build real expertise rather than simply market a new lane."

That caveat matters. Van Gelder explicitly warned forwarders off entering pharma simply because margins look attractive. Demand for complex, high-value therapies does not translate automatically into logistics profit for the underprepared.

Why certification is not the same as competence

The sharpest distinction in van Gelder's argument separates paperwork from understanding. Certification, he noted, does not demonstrate comprehension of what different pharmaceutical products actually require. Conventional medicines, clinical trial shipments and personalised therapies present fundamentally divergent sets of challenges — a forwarder qualified for one is not by that fact qualified for all three.

That divergence is widening as advanced therapies multiply. Each product category carries its own handling regime, its own failure modes, and its own cost when something goes wrong. For an SME, that complexity is both the barrier to entry and the moat once mastered.

What does resilience actually mean?

Van Gelder's framing of disruption response gives smaller operators their clearest structural advantage. Experienced, empowered teams, he argued, can sometimes adapt faster than larger organisations slowed by governance structures — bureaucracy is a latency tax that an SME does not have to pay.

But he rejected agility as a strategy on its own. "Agility without discipline is not resilience, it is risk," van Gelder said. "The winning combination is systems, specialist knowledge, human adaptability, and trusted partnerships. Collaboration is essential because no one company controls the full patient-critical chain."

Workforce resilience, in his definition, means giving employees the confidence and authority to raise concerns and act when contingency plans fail. He put it plainly: "Resilience is not created by a contingency plan. It is created by people who can act when that plan no longer works."

Compete on trust, not price

Van Gelder's closing prescription reorders the competitive hierarchy. "The future is not necessarily about who owns the biggest network, it is about who can orchestrate the most reliable one," he said. "Do not compete on price alone. Compete on expertise, reliability, flexibility, and trust."

For SME forwarders weighing a pharma entry, the sequencing is the point: build the specialist capability first — GDP compliance, validated procedures, temperature-control competence, trained people — then choose the corridor, whether that is a hospital cluster, a research centre, or an emerging lane into China's or India's innovation ecosystems. Marketing a lane without the expertise behind it, van Gelder suggested, is not a growth strategy but an unpriced risk in a chain where the end customer is a patient.