Grant Thornton International’s Australian member firm this month appointed Peter Glynn, a Big Four veteran, as partner.

Glynn is joining the firm’s audit and assurance practice. The unit helps companies verify their financial statements’ accuracy, as well as ensure that the internal processes through which those statements are produced meet reliability standards.

Glynn is joining Grant Thornton from Big Four member Deloitte, where he was partner for about a decade. He was earlier the financial controller for the European and Asian business units of Marken, a major clinical logistics provider. The firm became part of UPS in 2017 through a $570 million acquisition. 

An official press release detailed that Glynn advises clients in several parts of the logistics market including the shipping, warehousing and freight forwarding segments. Those are areas that have seen major changes over the past decade at both the competitive and operational levels. The increasing emphasis on automating, or at least streamlining, manual processes with technology is a major factor behind many of those changes. Market consolidation is another. 

“Key themes we are seeing in the market include continued M&A deals and sector consolidation, digital transformation including investment in technology,” Glynn told Boardroom Insight.

Private equity firms are major driver of M&A activity in the logistics space. Many of the deals that such investors make in the sector are so-called buy-and-build transactions: a private equity firm buys several logistics providers and merges them to create a large, well-resourced market player that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Technology is another major change driver for logistics firms. Glynn detailed that “we see continued tech investment in areas such as automation and robotics, customer experience including supply chain transparency, availability of real time data and simplification of key operating systems.”

Logistics providers’ enthusiasm for new IT products has been noticed by the venture capital community. Over the past decade, investors have poured a significant amount of capital into startups that develop software for logistics companies. Such software is generally aimed at one of two use cases: helping logistics providers maintain their vehicles more efficiently and finding opportunities to cut costs, such as by identifying shorter trucking routes. Reducing costs is a major focus for the logistics sector nowadays, according to Glynn. “We are also seeing many operators focus on profit and margin improvement given persistent labour challenges, increasing occupancy costs and higher competitive forces,” he said.

Those recruiting challenges have helped establish the logistics sector as one of the biggest markets for robotics outside the manufacturing space. Few outside the industry know that Amazon is the world’s largest producer of industrial robots, which it mainly makes for use in its own logistics network. And there are dozens of venture-backed startups that sell automation hardware for transport firms which can’t build their own. Some robot vendors focus on table-stakes in-warehouse transport use cases that companies have been automating for decades. Other market players are tackling trickier tasks, such as unloading newly arrived merchandise from trucks, that require more complex machinery. 

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