The Freeport of Riga: Leveraging quality management and marketing to drive revenue

The Freeport of Riga is a significant part of global and regional cargo supply chains and passenger traffic network in the Baltic Sea region, providing safe and reliable services. Cargo and transit is an important component of Latvia's GDP, which makes the Freeport of Riga Authority not only an integral part of the city, but Latvia as well, thus highlighting how important its is to coordinate and manage its social and environmental responsibilities in addition to the vital contribution to the growth of Latvia's economy. The Freeport of Riga manages this process through providing quality and breadth of services to clients, as well as establishing high performance standards.

The role of the Freeport of Riga is to maintain and extend the edge as a leading port of the Baltic States and as a source of GDP growth for Latvia through: Strengthening the customer base and seek to avoid dependency on any one cargo type; Developing a sustainability framework to ensure environmental and social issues are fully integrated in our business; Investing in new technologies and employing innovative approaches which enhance the quality and efficiency of services; and Working closely with the government of Latvia, the city of Riga and its inhabitants to create a seamless, integrated transport infrastructure. The Port not only has a marketing team, it provides governing activities and helps coordinate partnerships, exhibitions and commercial development supporting the Port.

One example of facilitating expansion was provided by Vita Gerharde, Marketing Specialist, who explained that the Freeport of Riga helped coordinate the infrastructural support, environmental and social responsibilities, and additional funding to build a new port adding 22 million tons capacity and $162 million euro annually to the regional economy. The Freeport of Riga already is the Baltic's biggest coal port, not only only facilitating transit with one of its largest partners Russia, but also the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands as well, in part due to its strategic location. Coal represents nearly 40% of the 36 million tons that are shipped through the Port each year.

Another example is attracting NATO cargo, which diversifies the Port's transit as well as adds security for the region. The costs and location advantages were marketed and supported, which helped leverage and extend the Port's capacity as well as the cargo emerged.

My take-aways from this seminar include:
1) location advantages;
2) building competence in transit (augment low cost with service as a differentiator);
3) infrastructure as a source of competitive advantage (support, operations, impact on capacity and costs);
4) opportunities and threats associated with relying on international cargo (EU, Russia/CIS);
5) build to suit partnerships;
6) free economic zones.