Asia vs. Europe: Why Chaos in Last-Mile Logistics Sometimes Beats Consistency

In this episode of Rozmowy Logistyków, Piotr Skobało talks with Ola Jaroskiewicz, an entrepreneur and manager with over 15 years of experience in online sales, about the differences in doing business between Asia and Europe. They share experience from RED STORE (a CD PROJEKT subsidiary) and other organizations on both continents.

THE DELIVERY GIG ECONOMY: WHEN YOUR NEIGHBOR IS YOUR COURIER

In many Asian countries, the last mile runs on something close to an Uber model — the delivery person is often a local resident signed up to a partner program, not a courier company in the European sense. This generates chaos (lost parcels, the same order delivered three times, sellers with no appetite for handling returns), but it also radically lowers cost and the barrier to entry — small local sellers can afford to offer same-day delivery, because labor is cheap and courier availability is huge. In Europe, the same level of speed (delivery by noon in major cities) requires an expensive, precisely organized network — a solution available only to large players.

LACK OF REGULATORY CONSISTENCY AS THE MAIN OPERATIONAL BARRIER

The European Union provides regulatory consistency and standardized transport solutions across countries — in Asia, every country is its own story: varying road infrastructure quality (in parts of Vietnam, land transport can be impractical, and you have to rely on air or sea), different building codes, different climate conditions (high humidity closer to the sea damages standard packaging — hence stories about snakes or cockroaches found in shipments, the result of warehouses not adapted to the local climate). Large Western companies entering these markets (e.g. L'Oréal, for whom Asia could become its largest e-commerce market, bigger than Europe or the US) often move production locally, partly because of protective tariffs, and use local operators instead of building their own network from scratch.

WHY AUTOMATION DOESN'T ALWAYS PAY OFF

In Europe, automating warehouse processes makes economic sense where human labor is expensive and its availability limited — in Thailand, with low wages and a large labor supply, a simple business case for a conveyor or other automated solution may not pencil out even over a 10-year horizon. That doesn't mean lower process quality — it's simply a different stage of business development: scale first, optimization later. There's also a cultural factor at play — in many operational tasks in Asia, people naturally work in pairs or groups rather than alone, which further changes the economics of automating single-person stations.

THE PARADOX OF FRESH FOOD ONLINE

In large Asian cities (Bangkok, Shanghai, Tokyo), online fresh-food delivery thrives despite a dense network of shops and restaurants within reach — a phenomenon hard to explain by pure logistics calculation, since fresh products (seafood, fruit) are among the hardest to transport. In Europe it's the opposite: customers happily order heavy, non-perishable products online (groats, water, drinks — "we don't like carrying things"), but for fresh products they prefer the control of choosing in person at the store. The key takeaway: what the customer expects culturally determines how the entire supply chain has to be designed — if the customer doesn't care about a banana's exact ripeness, the process can be maximally simplified; if they do, you have to build much more complex logistics.

ADDRESSING AS A HIDDEN BARRIER TO MARKET ENTRY

Urban infrastructure can rule entire business models out of a given market: in Berlin, apartment buildings are labeled by surname, not apartment number, so a courier can't deliver a parcel to the door — as a result, dietary meal delivery (a model that has really only taken off in Poland and Singapore, where coded intercoms let a courier enter and leave the parcel right at the door) has no chance of scaling into markets with a different addressing setup. The takeaway for anyone planning expansion: a global strategy requires dropping down to a very local level of detail — cultural, infrastructural, and technological — before logistics can even start working.

OUTSOURCING INSTEAD OF BUILDING A WAREHOUSE FROM SCRATCH

Many companies build their own warehouse from day one, even though building logistics in-house only makes sense at genuinely large scale. Logistics operators are happy to take on even small, just-launching clients, because for them it's a form of investment in the future — it's easier to negotiate good terms with a growing client from the start of the relationship than with an established giant. The example of Emma – The Sleep Company: the company reached 500 million euros in revenue in 7 years, operating in over 20 markets as an entity coordinating contract manufacturing and logistics through a network of partners, without building its own warehouse capacity from scratch.