The most important competencies in Haier Logistics

Abstract: Competence building of a corporation is a vital choice for a third-party logistics (TPL) provider for it to face drastic challenges, and the issue of competence building has attracted the attention of both academic and business communities. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how an appliance maker can build TPL competence, and the research questions of the thesis are as follows: (1) What are the main factors in building the competence of a TPL enterprise? (2) What are the advantages of building logistics-related competence for Haier Logistics? (3) How important is logistics competence for Haier? By applying a qualitative research method, the present study takes Haier Logistics as a case, a subsidiary of the Haier Group, which provides logistics services not only for all the companies within the group but also for other companies as a TPL services enterprise. The study identifies the main factors in building up logistics competence, the advantages of such competence, and the importance of such competence. The authors of the present paper have found out that six factors—namely, the integration capacity, the operation capacity of logistics, the innovation ability of logistics, the operation capacity of information technology, the marketing ability in logistics markets, and the capability of building logistics brand—are vital for Haier Logistics.