SINGAPORE (Aug 5): ComfortDelGro's car rental and leasing arm, Rent-A-Car (CRAC) is adding five prime movers to its fleet to muscle its way into the heavy vehicle arena.
The first two movers, a Volvo FM and UD Quon, have been received while the remaining other two Volvo FMs and one UD Quon will be delivered by the end of the year.
All five prime movers will be leased out to Haulio, a container trucking technology company incubated by PSA International’s corporate venture capital arm, PSA unboXed.
ComfortDelGro has a stake in Haulio, through its US$100 million corporate venture capital fund.
In a media release issued on Monday, ComfortDelGro says it may add more prime movers into its rental fleet in the future, depending on demand.
Haulio is an ecosystem of container hauliers, for which it builds tools and aggregates services. Haulio aims to help haulage service providers operate more efficiently while improving visibility and reliability for end customers. The platform has over 80% of Singapore’s hauliers onboard with an outreach of over 2,000 trucks to date.
Given the latest arrangement with CRAC, Haulio will now be able to offer hauliers prime movers for on-demand rental and port-related jobs such as Inter-Terminal Transfers. With this service, hauliers no longer need to keep spare capacities of prime movers, allowing them to save on operational costs.
The prime mover rental service is currently in beta testing and is expected to go live in September. It will be made available for hauliers through the Haulio Community Portal.
Yang Ban Seng, managing director and CEO of ComfortDelGro, says, “We are excited to be further expanding into the heavy vehicle leasing business. Given the similarities in vehicle fleet operations between container and passenger transportation, we believe this tie-up with Haulio will enable us to expand beyond passenger transport and into adjacent disciplines such as smart logistics."
As at 4.45pm, shares in ComfortDelGro are trading 2.22% lower at $2.64.
