Update for week ending Dec. 5

Hello from the Philippines!

Yes, a business colleague and I have been in the Philippines  this week meeting up with various logistics companies to learn more about this fascinating market. These meetings are a great way to improve upon our reports so look for what we've learned in such reports as our Asia Pacific Logistics, Global Freight Forwarding, Global Express/Small Parcel and even our Life Sciences Logistics report for 2014.

Anyway, the Philippines is a really great place. I've had a fun time running around in taxis - an adventure in itself!! and the people are absolutely wonderful. I'm looking forward to coming back!

As a result of the trip, there were no blog posts. I'll work on something over the weekend and post - I've got a couple of ideas. I did, however, get 3 Ti briefings written while here:

• Middle East ecommerce growth hindered by government regulations
• Mcommerce takes hold as the holiday season kicks off
• Is Asian air cargo on the road to recovery?

All three are in our weekly e-newsletters this week - it's free, sign up on our website if you'd like to receive this, or, if you're ever interested in just one of the briefings, let me know and I'll send it to you.

Meanwhile, I got a notification from CIO Review that my article I wrote for them, Growth of Ecommerce Sparks Creative IT Solutions, was published this week. If you have time, check it out and let me know what you think.

In other news....

My part of the Agility Emerging Markets Index Paper is now complete and next week I'll be working on our monthly Stifel Logistics Confidence Index paper, a few queries from a couple of magazines a Ti project and some other stuff.

3 briefs are also planned for next week for the Ti e-newsletters. I noticed that the GCC countries are looking at establishing an integrated logistics company, I may look into that for a possible Middle East brief. For the Americas, perhaps the possible Hapag-Lloyd/CSAV merger talks and how that may affect the shipping industry and for the APAC e-newsletter????????? no clue right now.

Lots of great stuff going on. It's great staying busy but I also really enjoy hearing from you all. Drop me a line when you have a couple of minutes, let me know what you're up to!

Until next week, thanks so much for reading the blog, the tweets etc. have a great weekend!

Cathy